


Lady Lazarus

by JonBonHovis



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, F/M, Gen, Kid Natasha Romanov, Memory Alteration, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Natasha-centric, Red Room (Marvel), SHIELD Missions, Time Skips, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:59:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 39,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8611894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JonBonHovis/pseuds/JonBonHovis
Summary: Natasha started young: all Red Room girls did. Training was rigorous, but she was working to be a prima ballerina-No, that's not right. Natasha started young: all Red Room girls did. Training was rigorous, but she was working to be a deadly assassin. She will do her country proud; she must.Snapshots throughout the Black Widow and Natasha Romanov's life, from the Red Room to SHIELD, and after.





	1. RUSSIA, 1948

**Author's Note:**

> Out of the ash,  
> I rise with my red hair  
> And I eat men like air.  
> \- Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

The Red Room is unrelenting and uncompromising, but Natalia works and lives and breathes it.

She has thirteen sisters; she once had more, but they failed and they are gone now. She accepts it without much questioning, each time their number drops. Ballet is not for the faint-hearted or the weak, Madame says. Only the best will survive.

All Natalia wants is to be a ballerina. She wants to be Odette, Giselle, Sylphide, Clara. She wants to be lithe and powerful and beautiful and have strong men lift her gracefully into the air like she weighs no more than a feather. She imagines what it will be like on stage when she is older as she practices the movements, jabbing and kicking and standing en pointe until her feet cramp. She lives in her own head most of the time, going through the motions in training while imagining the many bouquets she will receive in her dressing room from her admirers before her shows. This is how she envisions fulfilling her duty to her country, doing it proud.

Then Natalia is picked to help demonstrate in their first real fighting lesson.

It is a class the girls have been looking forward to for weeks: finally, a chance to use skills practiced on dummies for real, to prove themselves to Madame. The recent training sessions have all been used to size each other up, to guess their chances if they would have to fight each other. Each punch has landed on a dummy harder, each kick more accurate and sharp.

Their instructor is a young man, blond and blue-eyed with narrow eyes and a cold sneer. He does not tell them anything; only nods at Madame where she stands at the back of the room and walks along the line of girls, eyeing them up. Natalia is ordered up onto the mat with a sharp gesture; the rest of the girls kneel.

They circle each other on the threadbare mat that serves no purpose other than to mark the boundaries of this new arena. He stalks her like a cat stalks a baby bird; quietly, carefully until the strike that leaves Natalia gasping on the floor, tears in her eyes as she gingerly touches the right side of her face. It stings.

“Get up!” He yells. “ _быстро_!” Quickly!

She stumbles to her feet, only to fail and fall again and again at his hands until she is begging, pleading, “Please! _Пожалуйста_! _больше не надо_! No more!”

His face turns purple and she knows that is the worst possible thing she could have said.

“No more?!”

He only stops when it is time for the next class to begin, leaving her beaten and bruised and bloody and curled up on the mat as a demonstration to the other girls. As they file past her, Natalia senses their eyes on her but she ignores them and hides behind hair, humiliated, clutching her ribs (she thinks some of them might be cracked). A tendril of bloody spit drips from the side of her mouth to the mat but she does nothing until she is alone in the room; then, she is racked with sobs.

“Oh, _моя маленькая паук_.” My little spider.

Ivan.

Fingers gently pull away the hair lying across her face and tuck it behind her swollen ear. She keeps crying, heaving sobs that make her ribs ache. She hears his huff as he settles into a sitting position beside her, gently stroking her forearm.

“Do you know why we choose little girls for the Red Room, Natalia?” He asks but now she knows better than to reply.

“We could choose little boys. Little boys are faster than little girls, stronger than little girls. But, little boys grow up to be big men and people expect them to be dangerous. Big men can't trick people into thinking they are weak.

“Little girls are quiet. Little girls notice things. Little girls can trick big men into thinking with parts other than their brains. Little girls can convince big men that they are weak when they are at their most dangerous. Little girls can watch, and listen, and take their revenge in a most painful way.

“You will learn these things in time, little spider,” he says gently as he lays a hand on her head in an almost fatherly gesture, “and you will do your country proud.”

It is the death of the naïve, dreamy Natalia; the girl that emerges from the ashes is sharp and cold, one who carries out each movement with precision and deadly accuracy, who practices until her knuckles are bloody and then some, who is always first to the training room and last to leave. She heals and learns to stand en pointe through cramping feet, to perform jumps and leaps and tumbles fluidly and quickly, to snap a neck hard and fast.

The next time the girls have a sparring lesson, Natalia does just as Ivan taught her. She watches (he favours his right side and takes a step forward every time he goes to throw a hard punch), she listens (he winces when he has to block one of Yelena’s kicks with his left arm); and when it is her turn she is unsure and cowers, luring him closer and closer until she strikes, wrapping her legs around his neck, bringing him down, wrenching his left arm from its socket until she hears an ominous crack and a strangled yell.

Standing, she leaves her prey (whimpering and sweating) on the mat to look at Ivan, who is standing in the doorway with something akin to a smile on his face.

She will do her country proud.


	2. RUSSIA, 1954

The Winter Soldier – a legend made flesh. He is less of the giant, hulking machine she imagined and more of a normal man, slightly above average height and broad shouldered, but when he turns Natalia catches a glimpse of a metal shoulder and her breath hitches in delight.

Not at the fact that he has a prosthetic arm, but because he is _interesting_.

She can't wait to see him fight.

When the opportunity comes several days later as she passes one of the training rooms on the way to the kitchens for a 3am snack – stealing is encouraged in the Red Room, as long as it isn't important and you don’t get caught – she is even more impressed than she thought she could be. His movements, as he ducks and dodges imaginary attacks, are as fluid and graceful as water; his punches and jabs are impossibly forceful and precise; his kicks remind Natalia of a snake striking its prey. She watches from behind the doorway, half-pressed into the frame in an attempt to go unnoticed as he participates solo in a carefully choreographed dance duet with practice and concentration, until his chest and forehead are misted with a slight sheen of sweat and his breath is only a little harder and faster than before. Then, he comes out of his fighting stance – which is not all that dissimilar from hers, Natalia is thrilled to realise – and heads over to one of the ballet bars that line the mirrored walls of the room to where a towel hangs above a bottle of water.  

Natalia means to sneak past and leave him none the wiser when he looks straight at her through the mirror, making eye contact and chilling her to the bone. He knew she was there the whole time and the realisation makes her feel small and inexperienced. 

He wipes his face in the towel before slinging it around his neck and gesturing with his head for her to approach. She does as she's told, only betraying her nervousness in the tightness of her fists that even so open readily to give a salute once she's in the centre of the room.

“Что маленькая девочка, как ты делаешь так поздно ночью?” What’s a little girl like you doing up so late at night? He's still watching her through the mirror, and Natalia is unsure whether she should do the same, or look at his back, or not look at him at all.

She can't reveal her plan to steal food, and his comment ‘little girl’ has made her bristle because she's not little, she has almost completed her training and she's just crossed the 5’6” mark besides. So, with a burst of confidence, she says, “Я мог бы задать вам тот же вопрос.” I could ask you the same question.

It’s a bold move, and she stiffens in fear the moment the last word leaves her mouth. Talking back is usually worth a beating, and is something she doesn’t normally do, but she knows it was worth it when she sees the corner of his mouth twitch in amusement.

“Храбрый маленький паук, не так ли? Осторожнее с этим ртом, или вы можете ступить в.” Brave little spider, aren't you? Careful with that mouth or you might get stepped on.

He turns around to face her and Natalia is subjected to the full weight of his gaze. His eyes are piercing and cold, but seem older than the rest of him – like time has only affected his mind and left his body untouched. The ice of his eyes is unsettling, but she doesn’t look away, somehow feeling that she's met them before.

“Сколько тебе лет?” How old are you?

“Они думают, что семнадцать, сэр.” They think seventeen, sir.

He nods, once. “Вставай на коврике.” Get up on the mat.

She doesn’t hesitate, to her credit, but she does let out a shaky breath as she moves to stand in the furthest corner, the one opposite him.

“Ну, идти дальше.” Well, go on, he prompts, and she drops in to her fighting stance.

He studies her from his place beside the bar before approaching her for a closer inspection. He walks with all the grace of a big cat, carefully yet purposefully. As he circles her, she steadily avoids his eyes and the frown on his face, preferring to keep her gaze fixed on a crack in the mirror across from her, made when she forced Katia’s head against it.

She starts when he touches her, pulling at her foot, trying to move it to a flatter angle. She complies, and next he positions her fist closer to her ear, makes her bend her elbow a bit more, pushes her further down on her knees, and more.

And so, Natalia lets herself be moulded into shape by the Winter Soldier.

By the time he is finished, her muscles are yelling at her for being placed and held in positions they're not used to but he's happy. When she drops back into her fight stance a second time on his direction, remembering all his improvements, she gets another nod – one of approval.

“Помните, что для завтра ночью.” Remember that for tomorrow night, he says, and after picking his water up from the floor, leaves the room.

Natalia feels both excited about what just happened and terrified of who just spent twenty minutes correcting an already perfect stance. She practices falling in and coming out of it a couple more times before she comprehends the meaning of his last sentence - he wants to see her again tomorrow night. She might just be about to be trained in secret by the most formidable assassin the world has ever seen. 

So, Natalia goes the next night, and he watches her technique when throwing punches, kicks, and corrects her. The next, he looks at her defence. The next, they spar, and he gives her a bruise the size of an orange on her jaw.

In day training – that’s what her life now consists of: day training with the other girls and Madame, night training with the Winter Soldier – she pretends she slipped and fell on the stairs, ignoring Madame’s raised eyebrow and the narrow-eyed looks from her comrades in favour of practicing her pliés in silence. That night, she asks if he could try and avoid hitting her in the face, and the Winter Soldier obliges her by striking her body twice as hard as the night before. These new bruises, however, can all be covered by her uniform.

If the other girls suspect something, they remain silent. The atmosphere has become tangibly tense when Natalia is around them, and the usual unfriendly stares from Yelena – in second place in the rankings, behind Natalia – have become openly hostile; but Natalia ignores them. She practices the cool indifference the Winter Soldier exudes and feels all the more powerful for it. They can't touch her – can't hurt her – if she won’t let them.

She and the Winter Soldier spar each night for two more days until she finally manages to beat him by tripping him with a cheap trick and pinning him on his back, nails like claws on his carotid artery. When she scrambles off him so he can stand, she expects him to hurt her, to punish her for playing dirty but he surprises her and chuckles. It’s a step up from the nods and one word grunts he's been giving her and it fills her with glee. They start again and he fights even dirtier than she did and soon she's back on her back on the mat.

It becomes an unspoken competition between them – who can pull out the lowest blows, the most unfair moves. Natalia gets him in between his legs more than once, and in return he is more than happy to pull her hair or kick her there right back.

Soon, she starts to pull her wins up to equal her losses and once more she earns a nod of approval.

When she arrives one night to find the Winter Soldier assembling one gun of many lying on a table, she realises that their arrangement was planned, orchestrated to occur by some higher power for reasons unknown to her. It was no coincidence that she found the Winter Soldier training that fateful night; it was no coincidence that he was there in the first place. The knowledge annoys her somewhat – she had thought their sessions were private, theirs alone.

Even though she knows it’s not his fault – he's only following orders, after all – she takes out her frustration with the lack of control she has over her life on him next time they spar. Her movements are sharper, faster, her desire to win more for personal gratification than for learning. He notices – she leaps on his back like something possessed, holding on tightly and scratching him across the face when he finally throws her off. She snarls, and he growls right back at her, unafraid. It’s their longest fight they’ve had so far – usually there’s a clear winner after a couple minutes – but it’s also their most equal. Neither of them hold back. When Natalia lashes out to claw his eyes he grabs her arm and pulls it behind her back; she twists out of the hold and uses his size to flip him over onto his back before he counters with kicking her square in the chest with his two feet over his head. She flips back up as he reaches for her hair and yanks it by the root, dragging her across the mat and causing her to cry out and scrabble at his wrists before she remembers what she is and gets her footing, waits for him to bring her face up close to his until they're almost nose to nose before socking him in the jaw and causing him to stumble away but, more importantly, let go of her head. He has his hand on his face, massaging it and snarling at her from behind a split lip. She cracks her neck and bares her teeth before running at him, launching herself from his bent left knee to secure her thighs around his neck and twist, bringing him down to the ground. He's heavier than he looks, and when they land his weight and the impact of the stone floor cause her to hear a crack, and cry out as she feels a white-hot bolt of pain in her knee. She's landed on it sideways, and when he rolls away she can see the bone sticking out of her skin, feel the blood slowly leaking from the wound onto the cold rubber of the mat.

The Winter Soldier doesn’t notice – he kicks her in the stomach and the jolt causes her to shriek as her leg slides over the mat. He kicks again, and she understands somehow through her agony that he won’t stop until he's won, until he has the kill strike, so she elongates her neck and waits for him to go for it.

Another kick and then she feels his callused hand against her windpipe, squeezing. She gasps for breath, hands clutching her thigh, trying to cut off blood flow. Only when she starts to see spots on the edge of her vision does he let go, retreating from her back onto his knees with an expression of half fury, half horror.

It takes him a minute to speak, and when he does all traces of his previous cool, detached attitude is gone. “Что ебать это было?! Вы пытались убить меня, - были вы пытаетесь заставить меня убить вас ?!” What the fuck was that?! Were you trying to kill me – were you trying to get me to kill you?!

“Нет.” No, she scowls furiously. Now that they’ve stopping fighting she can see the damage she's done to his face – the claw marks down the side of his cheek running into an already flowering bruise on his jaw, to match the one he gave her the previous week – and she can't help but feel a glimmer of sick pride. She almost had him – almost had _them_.

“Ты псих.” You're crazy. He shakes his head and rips off a strip of cloth from around the bottom of his t-shirt, metal hand tearing through the seams as if they're nothing. He wraps it around her leg roughly, ignoring her gasps and groans, and ties it tightly just above her knee. “Вы трахал это сейчас. Они не позволяют мне обучать вас снова после этого.” You've fucked this up now. They won't let me train you again after this.

“Это заживет.” It'll heal, she dismisses him through gritted teeth.

He sighs, and moves back to sit on his haunches beside her. “Нет, вы не понимаете. Я больно один из своих лучших студентов - они не позволят мне продолжать.” No, you don't understand. I've hurt one of their best students - they won't let me continue.

She has to correct him – it’s important to her. “Я лучший.” I am the best.

He only rolls his eyes. “Не зря, не тогда, когда у вас есть гребаный кости, торчащий из вашей ноге, потому что вы были слишком горяч в учебном бою.” Don't be vain, not when you've got a fucking bone sticking out of your leg because you were too hot-headed in a training fight.

“Я буду в порядке в двух или трех дней.” I'll be fine in two or three days, she insists.

“Я клянусь, что это, как вы глухи или что-то.” I swear, it's like you're deaf or something. He bows his head and rubs his forehead with his hand. “Это не имеет значения, они посадили меня обратно.” It doesn't matter, they’ll put me back. Looking back at her, he says, “У нас была хорошая вещь происходит, мало балерина. Почему вы должны пойти и напасть на меня, как, что?” We had a good thing going, little ballerina. Why did you have to go and attack me like that?

The endearment makes Natalia feel like she's had an ice bucket of cold water dumped over her head. “Как ты меня назвал?” What did you call me?

_Suddenly, she's ten and still innocent, tossing a knife into a target board only for it to spin off and clatter to the ground. She's in her ballet costume, it’s one in the morning and she’s tired and frustrated with herself, with her inability to do such a simple task as get the pointy end of a knife to stick into a piece of wood._

_Yelena would be able to do this – she’d smile smugly at Natalia, carefully pluck the blade from her hands and sink it into the heart of the target, effectively killing it and any hope Natalia had of remaining top of the class._

_“_ _Вот.” Here, a voice says from behind her, and a tall man appears beside her and offers a metal palm. She places another knife, identical to the one she’s just thrown, into it. He tosses it into the air, flipping it around with practiced ease until it sits in the right direction. “_ _Вы хотите сохранить ваш запястье свободно.” You want to keep your wrist loose._

_He demonstrates the technique of throwing a knife a few times for her, emphasising the flexibility of his wrist before he hurls it at the wall unexpectedly. It lands right between where the eyes would be._ _“Стремитесь к голове, это быстрее и тише.” Aim for the head, it’s quicker and quieter._

_She does as he instructed and mimes the action of throwing, waiting to see his nod of approval before fixing her eyes on where his knife lies embedded in the target before flinging her own. It hits just above and left of where the head is marked – but more importantly, it sticks. She laughs delightedly, bounces a little, and looks up at her helper for the first time. His shaggy hair can’t hide his ice blue eyes, but when he smiles back at her, they crinkle and warm up a bit. She practices with him twice more – each knife coming closer and closer to his own – before she has to run and collect her weapons._

_“Молодцом!” Well done, he tells her when she comes back to him. “_ _Ты быстро обучаемый, очень быстро. Это будет проще с метательные ножи, а также, Вы должны принести их обратно на кухню, прежде чем повар понимает вас украли их.” You're a fast learner, very quick. It’ll be easier with throwing knives as well; you should bring those back to the kitchen before the cook realises you’ve stolen them._

_She blushes, ashamed. “_ _Простите, сэр.” Sorry, sir._

_He just chuckles, and runs a hand over her red hair, which had fallen out of its tight bun during her frustration._ _“Дайте их мне - я сделаю это. Маленькие балерин, вероятно, следует быть в постели прямо сейчас.” Give them to me – I’ll do it. Little ballerinas should probably be in bed by now._

_She hands them over obediently, handles first, and gives him another gap-toothed smile before turning to do as she’s told and go to the dormitories. However, something niggles at her and she stops in the doorway and looks back. Her helper has stayed where they were, and is looking at the knives she placed so gently in his hand – the flesh one. “_ _Сэр?” Sir? She asks, and he jerks his head up to look at her questioningly. “_ _Вы ковбой?” Are you a cowboy?_

_“_ _Почему бы вам сказать, что?” Why would you say that? He looks at her quizzically._

_“_ _Ваш русской звучит смешно.” Your Russian sounds weird. She wrinkles her nose and switches to English. “You are an American cowboy? The kind that are riding horses and shooting Indians?”_

_He looks like he has to think about that question really hard. It takes a couple of minutes for him to say, haltingly, “Just a regular American, I'm afraid.” Even then, he seems unsure, but she can hear his accent loud and clear._

_She nods, slightly disappointed – they'd been watching Westerns in class and the whole thing seemed rather exciting to her. “Thank you very much… with helping me. You are being very kind.” Her English isn't perfect yet, and heavily accented, but she feels very proud when he gives her a smile._

 

“Я думал, ты вспомнил.” I thought you remembered.

“My cowboy,” Natalia breathes, in English, in pain.

“Bit late now, with a bone sticking out of your leg. But at least you got there, I suppose.” He runs his hand over her hair in a familiar gesture. “Come on, I better get you to the infirmary.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, all Russian sourced from Google Translate; apologies for inaccuracies.


	3. HAVANA, 1963

They say poison is a Widow’s weapon; Natalia disagrees. The act of being interested is the deadliest weapon she has in her arsenal – interest in men, in women, in projects or ideals that endear her to her marks. It is more lethal than any wound or injury because once she is close enough to display this interest to her target, they are already as good as dead. Poison is just one of the tools with which she can close their coffin.

If she is honest, she’d much rather just shoot them in the head and be done with it. It’s dramatic, but efficient.

But sometimes delayed reactions are desirable so she smiles and simpers as a waitress, hands her mark – she doesn’t know what he's done to earn the wrath of the Red Room, but then it’s not her place to know – the small cup of espresso laced with a deadly neurotoxin from her tray and exits out the back door of the café, dumping it and the apron she’d stolen to cover her green dress in a bin about two streets away. Then, she pulls out her sunglasses, fastens her brightly coloured headscarf, and becomes a young woman strolling down the streets in the Cuban sun. The streets are bustling with merchants and buyers on market day, and she indulges in a ripe orange as large as her fist.

When Natalia arrives back in her hotel room, she feels hot and sticky; never has she wished for the cold winds and snow of home so much. Pressing the door shut behind her, she does an initial sweep of the room before venturing any further. Room service has clearly been in; the windows and shutters have been thrown open, leaving the white, wispy curtains in place to hold back mosquitos and allowing the room to feel airy and as cool as a third-floor suite in direct view of the sun can. Removing her headscarf and cat-eye sunglasses, she kicks off her shoes on her way to set up the record player. She dumps the fabric and eyewear on a small end table behind the door but leaves the shoes where they land. A few crackles can be heard before the first few bars of Swan Lake come to life from the vinyl.

Natalia sighs. She doesn’t know if it is the Russian in her or the ballet training in the Red Room but there is something about the no nonsense, perfect balance of classical music that she can’t resist. There is an uncommon symmetry between it and her – each note must be struck precisely; the rhythm must be constant, just as Natalia must strike precisely, keep up her mask constantly.

Unconsciously, her feet have moved themselves into fourth position, her arms risen as muscle memory takes over from when she used to dance at the Bolshoi.

_Not real_ , she remembers, but waves it off. Is it still not real if she remembers all the steps, the hand movements, as if she performed the dance yesterday?

“Ах, диван! Кажется, вы должны быть моим Зигфрид!” Ah couch! It seems you must be my Siegfried! The sigh is out loud as she closes her eyes and follows the music, though it is harder to go en pointe without the shoes.

Solo missions allow her this luxury of pretending to be Natalia Romanova for a while instead of Black Widow – something she would never allow herself do in company. With all these different aliases, different faces to put on every morning, the hardest thing for her to do is be herself – especially when she isn't sure who she even is.

It is serene for the next few minutes. Sunlight streams through the curtains, Tchaikovsky sounds quietly from the record player and Natalia gives her mind a reprieve and dances around the room as much as the furniture and her dress will allow her.

As she drapes her arms over the back of the couch, the music soars and a pair of hands position themselves on her waist as if in preparation to lift her in a soaring pas de deux in time with the crescendo of the music before Natalia’s eyes spring open, her centre of gravity drops and she is hurling the intruder over her shoulder with ease and getting into her fighting stance, ready. He lands flat on his back, winding him, and lets out a pained groan. The music ascends and falls, forgotten in the background.

“Guess I deserved that,” the man coughs hoarsely and draws a deep breath. “I should know better than to sneak up on you by now.”

“Солдат?” Soldier? She exclaims in surprise, tilting her head to one side as she stares down at him looking back up at her upside down from the floor, grinning sheepishly.

“S’alright, I’ve had harder knocks than that.” He looks at her and must see guilt there because he says, “Seriously, Talia, it’s my fault.”

“How did you get in here?” she demands in English, following his lead, embarrassed to have been caught unawares. She looks around the suite and sees nothing but a curtain rippling from the breeze.

“The window,” he says, confirming her suspicions. “You're a beautiful dancer, by the way.”

Natalia rolls her eyes at his compliment, given away by his lopsided grin that it is meant more as a line than genuine, and stands to move away from him. “Thanks, cowboy.”

He pulls himself up to sit on the back of the couch as she goes and takes the needle off the record, cutting off the music.

“Hey, leave it on.”

She turns surprised to take in the young man who, despite having broken into her suite, looks as if he belongs there. He's grinning rakishly at her, his top two shirt buttons left undone to reveal the edges of sharp collarbones. Slacks and braces flatter him almost as much as his combat uniform, his shirt concealing his metal arm, sleeve meeting a flesh coloured glove at the wrist.

“Really?”

“Yeah, or put on something we can dance to, something slow.”

She turns away from him to switch records and soon Rachmaninoff pours from the player.

Once they're gently swaying to the music – so slowly they're more locked in a prolonged embrace listening to the melody than anything – she is suddenly hit by a question. “How did you know that there was a lift at that exact point in the music?”

“Hmm?” His cheek and her forehead are pressed together and she can feel the vibrations.

“Before I,” she winces, “before I threw you over my shoulder. You were going to lift me – how did you know that there is a lift at that time?”

“Hey, I've done enough dancing to know when the music goes up, the girl usually does too. Not to mention the all the time I spent in a ballet academy.” He pulls his head back and grins at her and she frowns, imagining him throwing up unknown girls as if they weighed nothing at all. “And I'm not a sack of potatoes. Thrown over your shoulder… psh.” He pokes her side, which earns him a small smile and causes him to brighten up a little again.

They sway for a little longer, concentrating on nothing but the feel of each other. Natalia’s body sizzles pleasantly everywhere her skin touches his. She can feel his breath coming out in puffs against her ear. Then, the music swells and he lets go of her to put his hands on her waist and bends his knees a little.

“Trust me?” he asks, a little furrow between his eyebrows as he concentrates.

“More than I should,” she replies, and grips his shoulders when he lifts her up with the crescendo of the strings.

He twirls her slowly in the air, timing her descent in parallel with the music until her toes are just brushing the ground and she is nose to nose with him.

“I normally go for big band stuff, but this classical music ain’t half bad,” he murmurs against her lips, and Natalia sighs when he bridges the gap and finally does what she wanted him to do as soon as she recognised him on her carpet.

The kiss is furious and harsh, as it always is, and they both come away panting for breath, almost surprised to find themselves so wrapped up in each other. Her arms slide down from around his neck until her palms rest on his chest; his arms loosen his hold on her waist, letting her escape from how he had crushed her to him but not freeing her entirely.

“Natashen’ka…” he breathes. “I'm going to leave.”

She's a little put out at that, even if she knows he's right – he can't stay, not while they're on a job, not ever. The Red Room doesn’t allow relationships between agents unless they're for the greater good and glory of Mother Russia. They can't be together. If anyone found out about them… she knows they'd kill him. They'd kill her too. Probably slowly, and painfully; death can come swiftly, but the Red Room has made suffering into an art.

She has been taught her entire life that she is expendable, replaceable, and she doesn’t doubt it. There are probably girls in the academy right now, as young as she was, training as hard as she did to be the best. Natalia would risk her life for whatever they have between them, if it weren’t for him. Living in a world without her Soldier, she realises with startling clarity, is not a viable option for her. She would die for him, but she won’t let him die for her.

So she breaks eye contact, staring at his clavicle peeking from the collar of his shirt, and nods. Bites her lip and tries to break them apart. Any longer wrapped up in his arms is both a torture and a blessing.

Instead, he grasps her shoulders and holds her where she is, making her look at him. “No, you don’t understand…” His voice is a little louder with purpose and the air of decision. “I'm leaving the Red Room, the KGB, whatever. Never you, Natalia. I'm never leaving you again, if you’ll let me.”

She does as she has been trained, and hides her reaction to his insane revelation that has left her reeling, but reaches for his pulse to satisfy what is, to her, a legitimate medical concern. “What was the last thing you ingested?”

He shakes her off his wrist. “Stop, Talia, I'm not on any hallucinogens.”

“Doesn’t have to be drugs. Maybe you're dying,” she explains as pulls away from him, trying to get some space to process just the idea of what he said, not even considering the logistics or the consequences yet. “Because the Soldier I know wouldn’t be so stupid to say something like that to someone like me if he didn’t have a death wish!” Her voice betrays her and rises in pitch as she rushes to get out the sentence in her disbelief.

“I couldn’t go without telling you, Солнышко моё, but I'm not going back,” he says, and for all the solemnity in his expression, his eyes are bright and excited. “I've been remembering things… At first it was patchy – out of focus stuff like a pair of shoes and a newspaper- but it’s clearer now and there's places and people and… Talia, I remember my _name_.”

She is silent, taking in the enormity of what he's telling her. What he's talking about, what he's going to do… it’s treason at the very least, and means certain death, probably at her hands or one of her sisters’.

They’ve been out of Russia for over a month, attempting to capitalise on the madness that has gripped this country, and it seems like every day her Soldier becomes less and less like an infallible assassin and more real. They’ve talked about his past before, his lack of memory, his periods of absence that are long for her but a blink of an eye for him.  Neither of them really understand what it means. Natalia has come to accept the holes in her brain – if they were important for the mission, they wouldn’t be missing, and the mission is all there is. She has known that since she was young.

“What is it?” She ignores the rational part of her brain screaming at her to knock him out and drag him back to their handlers – the protocol she has been instructed to follow in this situation.

“James… I don’t have my last name yet.”

“James,” she repeats softly, and his beautiful blue eyes fix her with a gaze of such devotion she feels a shiver run down her spine. It makes her want to pull him closer and sprint as far away as possible at the same time. 

“Come with me,” he begs, grasping her hand which causes her to start. “You can find out who you were too, before this hell.” He speaks earnestly, and Natalia identifies an entirely different feeling creeping on the fringe of her mind as she comprehends what he really means. She's jealous: her soldier – James – had a whole life before this one, one with friends and family and daily habits and hobbies that are waiting for him to find. For her, there is nothing. There is only the Red Room. She has nothing to discover.

There are too many variables, too many risks that are unquantifiable. Too much of a chance of failure, of disappointment.

Besides, she isn't the kind of girl who allows herself to be swept away by a boy.

“I can't,” she tells him, and her heart squeezes painfully in her chest. Her admission hangs heavy in the air between them.

“I know,” he smiles at her after a while, but it’s sad, resigned. “I had hoped that, well, maybe… but you wouldn’t be you if you did.”

The next time their lips meet, it’s tender, soft. It makes Natalia’s head hurt because this is the only thing that ever has and ever could contend with her duty to her country.

They dance together for the rest of the record, slow and bittersweet. She focuses on him, on how her head rests on his shoulder, on how he sways back and forth, on how he buries his face in her hair, committing him to memory. It would likely be years before she would see him and feel him so close again, if ever.

“Be careful, Talia. It’s hot out there,” he says when the music ends and all that can be heard is a faint crackle of the vinyl, and she knows he's more referring to the on-the-ground situation than the weather.

“You know, if things go south, we might end up not walking away from this,” she points out, referencing the current political climate, meeting his gaze. She can't confess she ever thought a nuclear bomb would be the way she would leave this world, but it would be quick and that’s more than what some of her marks have gotten at her hands. It’s not just her in trouble though. “The whole world might not walk away from this.”

“Better make this one hell of a kiss so,” he says, and swoops in to press his lips to hers one last time.

She feels it, a low tug in her belly, a caress across her consciousness. As their lips push together more insistently, there’s a feeling, a sense of urgency, a word that fights every single one of her prerogatives, her painfully learnt lessons.

_Run_.

To leave the world behind, to leave her life behind. To run with him.

It’s terrifying.

She breaks the kiss, and he lets out a little hum before he chases her one last time for a gentle peck.

“A kiss for the end of the world,” he whispers, his eyes searching hers as if trying to sate a starving hunger, a single finger placed on her cheek. She in turn runs the pads of her thumbs across his cheek bones, presses her forehead to his in a moment of indulgence, breathes him in and pushes him away.

“Next time, I may not have a record player,” she tells him from the spot behind the couch she retreats to as he perches on the window sill, about to vanish back to from whence he came.

“If there's a next time,” he swears vehemently, “I’ll bring you a whole goddamned band.”

As he ducks out, Natalia feels like she's been ripped in two, and he's taken one half with him. They’ll catch him of course, and punish him, and her, when they find out she knew his plan and didn’t alert them. His actions might just have killed them both.

But right now she doesn’t care. All she can knows is she has a small, persistent wish for him to succeed and escape, to make his way back to her someday. It makes her feel like a child – to irrationally hope.

But as Madame always said, _love is for children_.

 

A large part of Natalia’s seduction training in the Red Room was focused on words; three words in particular that have the ability to make or break a mission in a heartbeat.

_Я люблю тебя._

Not an exceptionally challenging phrase, she began learning the power it and its various translations have in a situation as soon as far back as she could remember: _je t’aime,_ _te amo,_ _我_ _爱你_ _,_ _I love you_. Say it to early, and the mark could be scared off… too late, and the mark could withdraw, and all the trust that had been painstakingly built up would go with them.

Natalia has never shied away from using her sexuality as a weapon – it’s a tool that has served her well over the years. But in the years after Havana, Natalia can't quite bring herself to say the words. Now that she understands the emotion they describe, the passion they express, saying them to anyone else makes her feel like she's betraying both him and herself.

It happens after she sleeps with a mark. As she pulls up the straps of her satin dress back over her shoulders and stands up off the bed he says it to her back and she knows she has him in the palm of her hand. She also knows that, in the interest of her cover, of the mission, she has to say it back.

But she can't – the words shrivel on her tongue, like the autumn leaves on the trees on the other side of the sash window that shines morning sunshine onto the rumpled sheets of the bed. So she turns her face to her shoulder, avoiding eye contact but using the tone and inflections they taught so rigorously in the Red Room to say, “I adore you.”

It’s just enough of a change to satisfy her aching heart.


	4. OSAKA, 1989

It isn't until she feels the blood drip from her hands that she knows she's in trouble. Eight dead men sit at the dinner table, as if poised to eat: napkins tucked into collars, on laps; one man has a knife and fork in his hands. The rest lie on the ground, propped up against the wall, all in haphazard positions, all dead. It’s just Natalia and fourteen corpses.

The dead make sobering company and however despicable they were when they were among the ranks of the living, the stares and expressions of these men – terrified, enraged, resigned – follow Natalia as she takes a few steps before turning her shaking hands to see her palms.

The blood drips, and each drop makes her shiver.

_There wasn’t meant to be this much blood_ , she thinks. Most of these men had their neck snapped, or were garrotted, or shot once and accurately. Relatively clean ways to die. _Why is there so much blood?_

The room is silent except for her fast breaths. The shakes spread from her hands to the tips of her toes and up to the roots of her hair and soon it’s as if she's vibrating, stuck to the spot, eyes wide open and horrified at the sight of her hands.

_The blood, the blood, the blood._

Her hands stare back at her, pale and white and as clean as ever, but she feels it; the warm fluid coats and covers and slips over the ridges of her skin like gloves, invading every tiny crevasse, every line and fold. Blood stains her fingers and sticks under her nails; the pads of her fingers stick when she presses them together. The smell is cloyingly sweet.

She can hear the faint cries of a child.

It’s too much.

She slumps down unceremoniously, drawing her knees up to her chest and burying her head in the space between to avoid looking at her hands. Her back rests up against a dead man’s stomach – if she lay down it would almost look like they were in a lovers’ embrace, if not for her frightened features and his purple necklace from her garrotte.

  
She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, curled up like a child in the arms of a dead man. It almost feels like an apt position – she has always been closer to death than life, being one to give so many into its cold embrace. She was raised with death; it has never frightened her. The light travels across the room, and she doesn’t move. It is cold, and soon her breath mists the air in front of her. She is hyperaware of the blood, slowly seeping up her arms and over her chest and rising until it covers her mouth and flows into her lungs, and she feels like she's drowning.

This is not what ballerinas do, she thinks, but I am not a ballerina.

.

They fly her back to Moscow commercially and drive her to KGB headquarters. When her handlers congratulate her on a successful mission, Natalia shrugs in a way that says, ‘What did you expect?’

  
As soon as she is freed to go after a lengthy debrief she vanishes to the rooftop to shed the cloak of nonchalance she's draped herself in since leaving that bloody room and lets her internal war out into the night air.

  
The appeal of the cause she used to fight for so valiantly for has gone stale. Glorious Mother Russia has not been shining for some time – her people starving and poor while grey-haired men in moth-eaten uniforms grow fatter and fatter. Not one of them bat an eye at the violence she laid before them in her report: that unsettles her.

  
Nothing has been the same after the children’s hospital: _that damn hospital_. There are more voices, voices that crowd out the shrill tones of Madame in Natalia’s head reminding her of the job. She has a conscience now; one that cost hundreds of young lives to obtain, its aftertaste like ash in her mouth.

The hairs on the back of her neck prickle and she absentmindedly strokes the knife handle strapped to her hip.

But years of training don’t lose their touch after one messy mission. She's the best at she does for a reason. The combination of a level head, a dangerous skill set and fierce intellect has meant she's always been good at compartmentalising and moving on. Usually, the only thing she’s felt after a mission is a sense of accomplishment and a relish for the next job – the opposite of what she feels now.

But that’s another thing – _she thinks she's felt like this before_.

None of the emotions flooding through her feel new; in fact, they take up residence in her heart like old tenants, hinting at things she can't remember but maybe didn’t want to forget.

It’s on the tip of her tongue – she doesn’t know what it is, but she's almost got it – when she hears a noise behind her and her reflexes kick in. She whirls around to hold her knife to his throat and meets the sight of the barrel of his gun a hairs breadth from the tip of her nose.

“I would question your choice of a knife if I thought it was your only weapon,” the Soldier grins, and shifts forward so the glock she's pointing up and under his ribs pushes into his flesh before he moves back to his original position. “Trying to convince me you're at a disadvantage, Talia? Trying to lure me into a false sense of security, like a spider does a fly?” His cocky attitude to his obvious metaphor leaves Natalia trying to resist rolling her eyes. “It’s not going to work… I know you too well.”

The last time she had seen him, he had hopped out a window and left her alone, and that was almost thirty years ago. Her heart has gone against her training and leapt into her throat at the sight of him, and she has to wait until it moves back down before she can trust herself to speak. There is no room for sentimentality when there is a gun pointed between your eyes. She's not even surprised to see him – of course he would show up when she is already feeling as vulnerable as she ever has.

“I play no mind games with you. I think that is something we are both above, да??” Yes? Ruling out the usage of manipulative techniques is risky, but she's spontaneously decided to throw away the rulebook. Despite all that has happened, she respects him too much to treat him like a target. Besides, this will not be a job, this is personal – her own brand of Black Widow vengeance.

“Well, I'm flattered. The last time we met you cursed me into oblivion, and gave me a shiner on my way there; and that’s after you tried to kill me.”

She doesn’t understand what he's talking about. The last time she saw the Winter Soldier, he was telling her he defected, telling her his crazy plan before leaving her to deal with the repercussions.

Towards the end, she had believed him, she recalls. She had seen the desperation in his eyes and felt the clutch of his hands and realised that he might actually do it. But she had trusted him not to vanish, to totally abandon the organisation, the cause, her. The knowledge that she had misplaced her faith in him hurt as much as what they did to her after it was discovered he was gone.

Sure, she imagined his face on her punch bag, beating it until her knuckles were bruised enough to match the patterns on the rest of her body given to her as punishment for not alerting their handlers, for letting him get away. She cursed and swore and expelled every warm feeling she had when the words ‘Winter’ and ‘Soldier’ crossed her mind. She healed and she trained and she waited.

No one hurts Natalia Romanova and gets away with it.

She's experienced pain, and cried in pain before, but it was always physical, and paled in comparison to the way her heart is being wrenched now as she tries with all her might to hide what he put her through. The Black Widow has only loved three men in her life, and every one of them left her alone. Ivan and Alexei died, and she mourned them, and accepted that she would never see them again, fixed up the little cracks in her heart and moved on. James, however, abandoned her to a special kind of hell – a constant state of waiting, of longing. She had trusted him not to leave her, to come back for her, but he never did. The knowledge that she had misplaced her faith in him hurt as much as what they did to her after it was discovered he had vanished.

His comment has thrown her off, and despite her face not reacting, he must see her confusion in her eyes because his narrow and he frowns. He starts to say something, but stops in favour of venturing out, “How was Japan?”

An instant and Natalia has her knife pressed harder against his neck, her gun closer to his ribs. “How do you know about that?!” She hisses, stepping closer until she is in his face, slightly terrified but more furious that he has insider information. It causes him to bend his elbow and pull back his gun so that the barrel rests against his temple to stay against her forehead. “Who told you? Answer me!”

The Winter Soldier grimaces and grabs her wrist at his neck with his metal hand, squeezing and pulling it away. She doesn’t relent until he has cut off the circulation to her hand for so long that she can't feel it anymore, making it possible for him to shake the blade from her grip and drop it to the stone ground. Natalia gasps and groans through the pain until he lets go and throws her back a bit, when she cradles her hand against her chest and moves the gun from under his ribs to against his heart. She can already feel the ring of bruising appearing on her wrist and she hates him for it.

“I asked you a question,” she reminds him, calm and steady as she attempts to move the fingers on her injured hand and bring life back into them. “Who told you I was in Japan?”

“You did.”

Natalia flinches, then looks at him incredulously. “What? No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Stop saying that,” she snaps, lowering her weapon in frustration. “I haven't seen you in years.” She spits at the ground near his feet. “Ублюдок!”

He drops the hand holding his gun to his side, mirroring her. “Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” he says, drily. “I mean, I know every second away from me was probably torture for you, but come on, Talia.”

He always was a cocky bastard when he was with her. In front of anyone else, he was stoic and silent, but with her he was sarcastic and charming. She used to love it – it was like he kept a part of himself for only her eyes. Now, she hates it.

“Is this what you’ve been doing for the past thirty years? Coming up with pathetic one liners?”

He grins a little at that, though as he speaks the happy expression drops off his face to be replaced by one of confusion. “That’s what you said to me five days ago... exactly what you said. Word for word. When was the last time we saw each other, Natalia?” He takes on a tone of urgency.

“Thirty years ago in that cursed suite in Cuba where you left me!” Now that she has started, the words come thick and fast. He has always been the only one that she acts like this with, emotions on her sleeve instead of locked up. “You left me, James. I waited, and you never came! I waited, and you left me,” she exclaims, as close to emotional tears as she's ever come.

He wears a similar pained expression on his face – when she steps away from him to clear her head and give herself some space he follows the distance with his eyes. “I came back for you, Natalia. I came to take you away but they found us and they took you from me and wiped your memory clean.”

“Why wouldn’t they let me remember? Why would they take that away?”

“They took it from you so you would think I abandoned you; they left me with it so I would know I failed you.” He looks at her desperately. “They knew that even if I found you again when I wasn’t a blank slate and told you this, you wouldn’t believe me. They finally broke us.”  
They were right. Natalia doesn’t believe him.

But she so desperately wants to.

“How do I know you're not lying?”

James shakes his head incredulously and takes a step closer. “You know I can't prove anything,” he says softly, his stare intense, causing her to avert her eyes. “But you must know I've never said anything more true.”

“Don’t come any closer,” she warns.

“Natashen’ka,” he sounds like his heart is breaking.

She snaps, “That’s not my name!”

“Natalia,” he amends. “Come with me.”

“Нет!” No! She points her gun back up at him and he does the same to her, wary. “Why can't I remember?”

“There’s a chair–”

“I am well acquainted with the chair,” she says coldly, and sees his eyes widen slightly in surprise. Now that he has said it she wonders how she possibly could have forgotten it. She doesn’t know what it does or how it does it – but the feel of the metal cuffs tearing at her wrists and ankles and the cold of the steel case surrounding her head at her neck send chills down her spine. Not to mention the sound – the scream of a woman, as if she's being turned inside out.

“Then you understand the confusion, the panic. The last time I stood up after being in that chair they told me it had been twenty-five years and that the Natalia I knew was long gone–”

“They told you the truth,” she notes, simply. In that time, she has become the Slavic Shadow and the Red Death, lost Ivan, and married and buried Alexei with the last dregs of her virtuousness. Madame B would have said she had matured, and Natalia would have agreed with her, if not for the fact she felt more like a lost child than ever.

“–Then I heard about the hospital fire, and I had to see you, to see how you were.”

The affection in his voice, the worry, is overshadowed by memories of smoke and flames and screams. There’s just one last thing that she doesn’t understand. “Why are you telling me this?”

In an instant, his whole body language changes. His stance sharpens as his fingers tighten around the grip of the gun, his eyes darken – he turns from a man into a deadly assassin like dropping a mask. The wind picks up a little, and as it catches his hair she can see the tell-tale glint of an earpiece in his ear. “They wanted to see what you would do.”

Natalia feels as if she's just been submersed in ice water up to her neck at that. A test. She's failed. Failure leads to one thing in the Red Room.

“James?”

His fist comes flying at her face, and the battle begins.

She ducks, and holds his arm away while she knees him in the gut, making him drop the gun. He grunts and manages to twist out of her hold, grabbing her wrist and wrenching it behind her back, almost breaking it. The move causes her to open up her body’s defences and he lands several hard punches to her side. Each leaves her gasping for breath and flower bruises where they land. She stamps on his foot to get free – a juvenile yet effective move – but when she turns he blindsides her with a smack across her cheek which splits open her lip and sends her stumbling away to land on all fours, her mind blank and reeling.

It takes her a second to blink her eyes and recover, a strand of bloody saliva trailing from her mouth to the gravel she's suddenly in such close proximity to, and that’s all that he needs. He advances on her and kicks her in the stomach, a move that lifts her up in the air and slams her on her back. She can feel each individual stone digging into the back of her head and down her body as she looks up at the man who, once her lover, is about to become her killer.

James stares down at her, his head blocking the street lamp and causing the light to surround him like a halo. Natalia can't help but see an avenging spirit, an angel of death. Beautiful, yet deadly.

“Do it,” she coughs, twisting her head to spit out another globule of red saliva before looking back up at him. “I haven't got all night, cowboy.”

The nickname makes him falter, and he steps away from her. His face is streaked with light and she can see his eyes that had been a dull lead grey a second ago flicker back to life.

“I can't,” he says, his voice sounding like a child’s in disbelief. He looks at his hand, the flesh one, and Natalia knows he sees the exact same thing as her – blood, red and hot and dripping.

She feels a flicker of pity before she grabs the gun lying an arms breath from her head and fires three slugs, into his shoulder, gut and thigh. They're not kill shots, but justice has been served; he didn’t kill her, and she has returned the favour. As soon as he drops, she's up, hobbling as fast as she can to the rusty fire escape that will let her descend relatively undetected down the side of the building, and out into a life where her employers won’t manipulate her, and she can work on her revenge.


	5. 1990-1997

She's in Singapore when she first catches a sniff of a trail – she has to break into a secure facility with deeply buried ties to Moscow but she gets a name, _Dr Lyudmila Kudrin_ , and it’s more than she's ever had before. She freelances her way across Europe, taking jobs in countries she is lead to as she follows a string of vague clues she stumbles onto by chance, killing dignitaries and politicians and crime bosses and whoever else her clients want out of the picture. At one stage the breadcrumbs dry up and she finds herself in Tirana for almost a year, doing petty work for all the clans of the Albanian mob and all the while searching for the next piece of the puzzle.

The jobs are familiar but she has more freedom – a term she never really understood until now. This isn't the first time she's worked alone but it is her first experience of not having someone to report back to, of being her own boss. In one regard, she misses the clinical nature of Red Room missions: flying in, completing the objective and flying back out again; on the other, the extra control she has over picking her targets makes her feel better about herself and what she does. She works out covers and makes contacts. Changing her identity is as easy as changing her clothes.

The Red Room send men after her, but it is a fool’s errand: they trained her to be the best, and it is a title she certainly lives up to.  
It takes her five years of dead ends and ghost stories before a rare clue leads her to a lab researcher with a surprisingly high pain threshold across the border in Greece, who directs her to an aid organisation working primarily in Zaire.

It takes her another twelve months to establish the connection. She trawls through the employee lists, looking for those with a Russian background and experience in genetics or human biology and compiles a list of most likely targets. She stalks each of their families, their homes, their last known places of work, their favourite places to go to eat and drink and relax. Each country that she goes to mysteriously develops a higher murder rate for the duration of her visit.

It’s when she's strolling through hectic streets of Ho Chi Minh, filled with tenacious street vendors, unfazed locals and brave tourists that she first sense eyes on her.

Her training has her remaining impassive though her heart beats a little harder in her chest. She has no doubt that whoever is watching her knows exactly who she is and what she's done – the stare is heavy, and raises the hairs on the back of her neck. There's nothing appreciative in the sensation.

It takes some effort, and annoyingly interrupts her plan for the day, but she loses her tail by jumping into a bus as another blocks their view – an old trick learned from an old friend. Now she knows there are other players in this game, and she’s fighting a war on two fronts: one, for justice; the other, for her life.

.

It’s rainy season in Central Africa, and the village is small enough that the sight of a white woman walking down the path attracts stares. She takes no notice, of course – she has a mission; and children on the side of the road are hardly a threat to her.

The hospital looks more like a large mud hut than a healthcare facility but that’s irrelevant. When she steps in, she is met with rows of beds shrouded in mosquito nets: in them, women in labour or new mothers grasping their infants that howl to announce their introduction to the world. It’s a cruel sight to her, one that only strengthens her resolve.

A nurse sees her and approaches her, but she warns her off with a shake of her head and proceeds to walk towards a doctor cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn – her target, narrowed down from a list of two hundred. It makes some sick, twisted sense that the doctor who cut out her womb would be helping others deliver the fruit of theirs. He hands the child to the mother, exchanging a laugh and a kind word, before wiping his hands on his apron and stepping out from under the net to move to a small supplies room towards the back of the ward. She follows.

She pushes him out back behind the makeshift hospital and holds the gun to his head. The man remains standing impressively tall for someone his age, with his hands in the air, but she can see his knees knock together slightly in fear. There are still stains of blood on his hands.

“I'm looking for a Dr. Kudrin.”

He frowns briefly before he places the name and his eyes widen in understanding. A tremor passes through his body and she knows he's realised what she is.  
“Y-you must know, we haven't worked t-together in years,” he stammers.

His answer doesn’t impress Natalia and she cocks the gun, deciding to aim for a freckle located just above the ex-KGB doctor’s eyebrow.

“Wait, p-please! Don’t kill me! My patients! I–”

“Tell me what I want to know.”

“Her assistant, last I heard he works in Stuttgart in a private laboratory. He would know. I swear, I have no idea where she is!”

Natalia tilts her head as if she is trying to determine whether he is telling the truth – she knows he is, the physical markers are all there, but she enjoys watching him stew. His breaths come loud and fast, and even in the shade, out of the midday sun, he is sweating enough for the both of them.

After a minute or two, she relents, and lowers the gun. “Thank you.”

“May I…” He visibly shrinks in relief and looks hesitantly at her, then the door.

She smiles, “Please,” and moves aside.

He's nearly at the door when she vaults and lands on his shoulders, her thighs tight around his neck so when they land heavily, his spine has already snapped.  
Justice done, she leaves the body in the dust and dirt and walks around the side of the building to a jeep, hotwiring it and setting off to secure a plane ticket to Germany.

.

Once he's securely tied to the chair, Natalia straddles him, her legs on either side of his thighs. It would be an intimate position if not for her intention. He looks defiantly at her, but she can see the flickers of panic in his eyes and it serves to egg her on.

“Where is Kudrin?” she purrs in his ear. The German caresses like velvet, the harsh sounds dripping off her tongue.

The assistant spits, saliva mixed with blood in a globule that flies over her shoulder as she dodges, “Du schlampe!”

Back in position, she pouts. “That’s not very nice,” she says as she reaches for the stiletto against her thigh and twirls it around in her fingers until it is right in front of his face, the drops it, catching the handle just in time before the tip pierces the crotch of his trousers. She smiles wickedly at his squeal. “I've always been a stickler for manners.”

Apparently, his near brush with castration hasn’t phased him enough, because he remains silent. His eyes are wider though, the pupils more blown out before, and his forehead is starting to look a little damp. She can't deny she's pleased; she loves a challenge.

“You know; I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I have always been asked, ‘why do you use a knife when a bullet would be so much quicker?’ and here’s why,” The blade edge follows the line of buttons on his shirt up his chest and scrapes his neck.

“Guns are for business. Knives,” she continues as she caresses the sharpened edge against the top of his quivering lip, watching his eyes cross as he attempts to follow its path. “Knives are more personal. And though this is my business, it is very personal.”

She drags the tip of her dagger down the side of his face, tracing the path of a newly-formed bead of sweat as it drips down his temple to his jaw. As she reaches his chin she flicks the knife off its edge, nicking him a little and causing his entire body to flinch, violently.

“Oops!” She giggles innocently, as if she hadn’t meant to hurt him, enjoying herself. His pupils are fully blown out in fear now as she holds the blade between them, as if inspecting the line of red that decorates its edge. Her tongue darts out; she's tastes it, and grins. She's rubbed her tongue on her teeth so when she bares her teeth they’re stained crimson.

“Tangy,” she tells him the flavour of his blood and he breaks.

“Malmö! She's in Malmö!! In the institute! Please don’t hurt me, don’t eat me!!”

“Malmö,” she replies thoughtfully. “Thank you.”

And then she whips out the revolver tucked into her belt at her back and shoots him in the head.

.

The woman doesn’t even startle when Natalia literally drops in to the lab – literally, because she comes in through the air vents that line the ceiling of the facility like the tunnels of an ant colony. They haven't been cleaned in years, and she takes a moment to brush the dust off her hands and knees and shake out her hair before committing to the interrogation.

Dr. Lyudmila Kudrin looks no older than forty, but Natalia knows she should be at least twice that. “I thought you might be coming. When Gregor was found, they said suicide, but I knew better.”

The woman turns, and immediately Natalia can see that something is wrong – the scientist is upright, but she stands crooked and hunched, fingers of one hand gathered to her chest in the form of a claw. Her face is wrinkle-free, but her eyes are hooded and clouded with a pain that has nothing to do with Natalia’s presence. Behind her, test tubes spin in a machine that whirrs loudly; calculations litter a whiteboard, most crossed out.

“Tell me about the serum.”

It was medicine back then, in the Red Room. Every week for a year, she would spend an agonizing hour or so in a chair hooked to a drip, practising French grammar, Spanish grammar, English grammar. Each week in training she would feel that her bones were harder, her kicks stronger. Bruises started healing in a couple of days, then overnight. Her eyesight was clearer; even her teeth were straighter and sharper. She thought this condition was the norm – it was medicine she was getting, after all, to treat her imperfections. It was years before she found out this was not the case.

“It was only a copy; a pale imitation of the genius that was Erskine’s formula. It performs the same basic function – enhancement of the mental and physical capabilities of a subject – but in a cruder, slower, much more painful way, and rarely to the same level as that achieved by his Captain America,” she spits the last two words out as if they are bitter in her mouth.

“What is wrong with you?”

“Experimentation gone wrong. In the absence of subjects, I've tested my serums on myself and while they have kept my face young, my bones have become brittle and stiff. The correct formula should correct this, but I have yet to synthesise it.” She laughs a little ruefully. “And so I keep trying in desperation, and make myself sicker and sicker.”

Natalia can't bring herself to care.

It is silent between them for a moment before Kudrin asks, “Are you going to make my death look like a suicide, too?”

“No. This one is murder. I've been looking forward to this for such a long time, to make it seem like anything else would be a crime.” Natalia answers firmly, and the scientist nods her head, almost as if in agreement.

“You should thank me,” she rasps, clutching her deformed arm closer to her chest. “Everlasting youth, beauty… Time will pass you by and leave you untouched. Think of the freedom, моя дочь. You could do everything you wanted to do, go everywhere you wanted to go, and never feel trapped by your own body.”

She paints a pretty picture, but when Natalia looks to the future all she can foresee is inevitable darkness and herself, alone. The words ring around her head regardless until she takes note of a particular one.

“What did you call me?” She asks, low and dangerously.

“My daughter, for I made you what you are.”

“And I'm repaying you for that. Consider this fifty years’ worth of Mother’s Day presents.”

Natalia shoots out her kneecap, and lets the scientist scream while she drags over a chair.

 

“Why does the KGB want me dead after so many years?” The woman asks in between whimpers, but even in this state it seems more like she is probing than curious, like she is searching for confirmation of something.

“I'm not KGB anymore.” Natalia answers dully, concentrating on tying her legs to the chair.

“Let me guess… You found that you were missing memories of months, maybe years of your life and suddenly the cause didn’t seem quite as wonderful as it once did. Pchelintsov was always an overeager idiot.”

The name sparks memories she didn’t know she still had – scientists and headaches and confusion and at the centre of it all, that damned metal chair. Though she doesn’t say anything, Kudrin sees her pause and a gloating smile appears on her face.

“I knew it; I told him,” she laughs scathingly, seemingly enjoying the failure of her colleague even now. “It’s harder when they're young – the brain isn't fully developed; take too much and it affects the subject negatively. They start behaving differently, getting ideas…”

The familiarity of what she's describing sends a chill down Natalia’s spine – it sounds eerily like the situation she found herself in on that rooftop. The implications are terrifying. How many times has her mind been invaded? What has she been made to forget? Her mind screams James before she scrunches the thought up and throws it away.

Kudrin continues, “He killed one of your number, I remember. Reached in too far and left her brain dead. You're lucky.”

Natalia scoffs. She isn't sure that death is worse than the life she's been living. Who knows, aside from the ones she remembers, what unforgivable atrocities she has carried out in the name of glorious Mother Russia? “That is debateable.”

“Have you found him? Pchelintsov.”

“Tell me where he is,” she demands, and digs her finger into the bullet hole in the scientist’s leg, causing her to shriek and pant.

“If I tell you, will you kill me faster?”

“I won’t kill you slower.”

It’s not a promise.

 

She walks out of the facility wearing a grim smile and the feeling of a closed chapter, a completed mission, and joins the flow of pedestrians travelling home after a long day’s work. It’s when she's walking through the city that she feels it – the familiar tickle on the back of her neck, a warning that she's being watched. Stopping at a traffic light gives her the perfect pretence for searching for the source and sure enough, she finds it – the shadow of a man on the bridge.

He follows her for three blocks before following her into an empty construction site, one hand swinging by his side, the other in a jacket pocket, hiding the outline of the gun she knows is there. She waits behind a pile of steel beams for him to walk past her, and as soon as he does, she's on him.

The fight lasts longer than she expected. He's better than her usual opponents, and manages to get several hits in, but she's the Black Widow and he goes down hard. She points his gun at his forehead as he lies on his back beneath her, and says in broken English, “Nice finally to meet you.”

If he's surprised at her cordiality, he doesn’t show it. He sniffs, reaching up to wipe the blood from his split lip on his jacket sleeve before putting the same arm behind his head. The gun goes ignored, though he doesn’t try anything. “I would have preferred nicer circumstances. Over coffee, perhaps. Or a beer?”

Natalia raises her eyebrows and his cocky tone and points the barrel of his gun at his crotch. She's learned she can get a lot of men to do what she wants with this move.  
His ‘charming’ grin falls, though his body language remains casual. “Cold,” he remarks.

“If you must to tail me, do not be so obvious about it,” she admonishes him.

“Name’s Barton.”

“I do not care,” she tells him, and knocks him out with the butt of his gun. After searching him and finding only a wallet with twenty euros, a pack of gum and a piece of string, she tucks the gun in the front of his trousers and leaves him, using his money to pay for a taxi to the airport.

It’s time to go somewhere a little warmer.


	6. RIO DE JANEIRO, 2000

The favela the good doctor has been living in is one of the better slums in Rio – his shack benefits from a perforated iron roof and he's lucky to have a rickety door – but the fact that he lives in poverty now doesn’t stop her from exacting her vengeance, especially after she sees a little girl with unfocused eyes stumble out into the street, a bewildered expression on her face. Natalia feels a surge of rage because she knows exactly how that little girl feels; scared and confused because an old man stuck his hands into the cat’s cradle of her brain and snipped away the memory strands.

It is dark in the single-roomed hut when she walks in, and sparsely furnished except for one armchair in the centre of the room, clearly where he performs his experiments. Pchelintsov has his back to her at first but when he turns around she can see the face that haunts her nightmares, though it is more wrinkled and sweaty now. His eyes widen in alarm but she doesn’t let him let out so much as a squeak.

She takes his life for selfish reasons but can't help think of all the people he wronged – her, the other Red Room girls, James. It’s an odd thought – she's unused to feeling the need to justify her actions. When it is done, she arranges herself in the armchair and waits for SHIELD.

Barton, the agent she knocked on his ass in Sweden, has been actively hunting her since and chatter on the shady streets is that he's out to kill her; whether that was his original mission or he’s looking to regain lost pride, she doesn’t care. Natalia is struck by the convenience – now she won’t have to do it herself. It hasn’t stopped her from meticulously planning it out, however. She can only hope he's a better shot than he is a brawler.

It is something she has been considering for some time now, death. Now that she has gotten her revenge on the people that turned her into the monster she is, there is nothing left for her. She's done the research, worked out the math. By the UN’s standards, she's basically a war criminal, though her case is unprecedented. But that’s only the sum of her actions she remembers – who knows what she could be leaving out. Killing is what she does – she can't change just because she decides she's had enough. It’s engrained in her psyche; she's savage, and what is left to do with a feral animal other than to put it down?

It’s the guilt talking, and she thinks it might be time to listen to it. But every time she's brought the barrel of her gun to her temple she's been unable to pull the trigger – she's too well trained. The instinct to survive, to complete the mission, has been programmed into her genetic makeup. Suicide is only for in the event of capture. Natalia has decided that it must be someone else who does the honours, but it will be on her terms.

She sees his gun before she sees him as he clears the corners, obviously suspecting a trap. It makes her lip curl in amusement. Surely he must know that he would never catch her unless she wanted him to?

“Black Widow, you are under arrest. Stand up and put your hands on your head.”

“Взял вас достаточно долго!” Took you long enough, she says, playing with him. She knows how funny this must look – him standing as taut as a bow string with a gun pointed (accurately aiming between her eyes, she has no doubt) at her head as she lounges in a chair with one leg over the arm, grinning delightedly at him. He looks like a professional, this time – his hair is cut short, his eyes are sharp, and though he is wearing some kind of weird outfit, his body language screams ‘dangerous’. “Sorry, but I don’t speak Russian,” he drawls without taking his eye from his sight. “So if you have anything important to say, I’d stick to English. Now I'm going to say it once more: you're under arrest.”

“Oh, Agent Barton,” Natalia purrs, tilting her head to the side as she stares right down the barrel of his gun. “We both know that is not true.”

He holds her gaze before his eyes flick over to Pchelintsov, who lies at her feet. “Why’d you kill him?”

She sighs and leans her head back on the chair. “What is it they say in the movies? He done me wrong.” Her Southern accent on the last part is a little rusty but it gets the point across.

His eyes narrow as he looks at her, and its silent between them for a few minutes; he seems to be considering something. She stares right back at him unflinchingly, her face hiding her confusion.

_Why doesn’t he take the shot?!_

Natalia feels, though it is somewhat ridiculous, betrayed. She has lined herself up nice and prettily – dilapidated single-storey building, one exit, point blank range – to die, and here she is, about to fall at the final hurdle because it looks like some stupid American is having second thoughts.

“Do you have any weapons on your person?” He breaks the silence, with the air of having made a crucial decision.

“Depends what you consider to be weapons,” she grins rakishly at him while baring her teeth, holding her hands up, twirling her wrists like she would when dancing. When he doesn’t react, she drops them abruptly. She's had enough of playing and he's no fun, not to mention the slowest assassin she's ever come across. His marks probably have lived long enough to be almost dead from natural causes before he gets to them. “Agent Barton,” she doesn’t grin, or flirt, or put on any tricks; instead, she uses a business-like tone. “I came here to die.”

“Well, I'm going to have to disappoint you, ma’am, because I'm not going to be the one to kill you.” He steps forward, gun still pointed firmly at her, and pulls out a pair of handcuffs. “If you’d be so kind.”

She's furious with him. _This was not part of the plan!_

She lets him get the first bracelet around her left wrist before she punches him hard in the jaw with her right. In a second, the muzzle of the gun is pushing against her temple but he's chuckling lowly.

“Figure I deserve that,” he motions for her to slip the offending hand through the second bracelet, which she does, glowering at him the entire time. He takes the time to remove her garrotte from inside the sleeve of her suit. “Now, if it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t kill me or my men before we get out of here.”

They emerge from the rickety shelter and are faced with at least twenty agents (no women, Natalia notes, exasperatedly), all in suits of varying dark colours, pointing guns from over the top of the hoods and roofs of three SUVs. Natalia almost snorts – they're as ostentatious as a crow in a flock of yellow canaries.

“Stand down!” Barton calls. He’s escorting her with one hand firmly gripping her upper arm; the other holds the gun that keeps prodding her back.

The men do and look suitably perplexed underneath their black sunglasses – they had clearly been expecting their captain to come out with a body bag in tow.

He tugs her out and over to one of the cars as one of his agents runs up to him. The disappearance of the guns brings the children of the favela out in force and they mill about between the other men, some begging with their palms open, others laughing at the white men sweltering in the forty-degree heat.

“Sir, we are under orders from Director Fury to oversee the neutralisation of the enemy operative known as the Black Widow–”

“I remember, Agent Williams.”

“So you’ll understand if I confess I'm a little confused–”

“Change of plan,” Barton says shortly, before placing a defeated and very annoyed Natalia carefully in the car, making sure she doesn’t hit her head as she climbs in. Once she's safely inside and he's clipped her seatbelt on, he turns back to the agent, who is currently trying to fend off a group of children who keep pointing at his sunglasses. “Don’t be a dick, Williams,” he says as he plucks them off the other man’s head and gives them to a young boy with a smile and a pat on the shoulder. “And get in the car.” 

 

“You know what? I want some coffee.” They’ve been cruising the more developed areas of Rio on the way to the airport for about twenty minutes after leaving the edge of the favela when Barton turns down the Top 40 radio.

Agent Williams starts. “Sir, may I remind you that there is a highly dangerous enemy operative–”

“Do I look like a goldfish to you? Am I doing something today that has lead you to think I have a three second memory?”

“No, sir–”

“Of course I know who's sitting in the back seat, I'm in the fucking car with you! No disrespect, ma’am,” Barton looks at Natalia through the rear-view mirror before turning back to Agent Williams beside him. “Now, I want a coffee.” He swings the car over a lane and mounts the curb, illegally blocking half of the footpath in front of a small coffee shop.

“Sir, the escort–”

“Tell them to do a lap of the block or something, I’ll be back in a minute. Want anything?” He asks Natalia, twisting in his seat to face her. Williams beside him looks scandalised in between waving apologetically at the pedestrians making rude hand gestures and swearing at them in Portuguese at them for the way they have parked.

It occurs to Natalia that this might some kind of American intimidation tactic that she's unfamiliar with before she decides to take the bait. She had been fairly convinced she would be dying this afternoon, and the turn-around had left her exhausted from what she could only describe as emotional whiplash. A pick-me-up would be nice.

“Just coffee. Black,” she replies and Barton grins wolfishly.

“A woman after my own heart.”

He pulls the keys out of the ignition and pops the door open, jumping down onto the road as Agent Williams starts, “Can I have–”

“I only have two hands, Williams. None for you,” Barton cuts across him and slams the door.

When he comes back he's got two cups of coffee and a fist full of sugar sachets.

“I forgot to ask,” he says as he manoeuvres himself back up into the driver’s seat without using his hands – he had to gesture angrily to the other agent to open his door from the inside – and turns to her again, carefully handing her one of the steaming hot paper cups which she has to take in both hands because of the cuffs, “If you wanted sugar.” He extends his arm and opens his hand to reveal about ten wrinkled sugar packets.

Natalia looks at him pointedly and holds up her hands. They're full, thanks to the cuffs and the coffee.

Barton frowns before realising. “Oh, shit, I forgot that too. Williams, let the lady out of her shackles.”

This time, Agent Williams lets out a squeak and even Natalia can't help but raise her eyebrows.

“Sir?”

“Don’t be a little bitch about it, we all know she could have had them off five minutes after we put them on her. Am I right?” He asks her.

She obliges him and has a quick look at the metal bracelets and the locking system before mentally running through the steps to freedom in her head and calculating. It’s a simple process. “Probably less.”

“See? We’d be dead by now if she wanted to kill us, so to say thank you for letting us stay in the land of the living we can at least let her put sugar in her goddamn coffee. Fucking hell,” he says to himself as an afterthought, looking out the window. “I'm never taking one of these assignments again.”

Natalia is slightly amused that he has mistaken her current total lack of care for her life for benevolence. Williams opens and closes his mouth at Barton for a bit before fumbling at his belt for his keys. He refuses to make eye contact with her, only focusing on trying to unlock the cuffs without actually touching her in the process; she grins widely at him, baring her teeth. When Barton has the car up and running again and moves it off the curb, the bump causes his knuckles to knock against her thumb and he almost lets out a sob.

“Oi! Watch the coffee,” is all Barton says, but the look on his face indicates that he's enjoying himself immensely.

Once the cuffs are off and Agent Williams has retreated to his seat to lick his wounds, Natalia flexes her wrist. She goes to sniff her coffee but is unexpectedly hit by a freak shower of sugar packets.

“Sorry,” Barton says, not sounding very apologetic after clearly having thrown them all at her over his shoulder. “Give me back all the ones you don’t use,” he instructs.

Natalia takes two and gathers the rest into a pile which she holds out over the central console. Barton puts an open hand over his shoulder and she drops them carefully into his palm.

“Thanks,” he says, eyes on the road. Depositing them in his lap, he opens them one by one with his teeth and pours them into his coffee in a cup holder next to the handbrake until Natalia counts all eight packets.

“Sir, is that really wise?” Agent Williams pipes up sulkily. “That’s your fifth cup today.”

“Mind your own fucking business, Agent, not my coffee habits.”

The rest of the car ride is silent except for Barton’s occasional slurp of his drink. When they get to the private airstrip – she expected no less; as if SHIELD agents flew _commercial_ – Agent Williams practically falls out of the car in his rush to get away from them. Barton ignores him, turns off the engine and drains the rest of his coffee before twisting around in his seat to her. “You finished?”

“Yes,” Natalia replies, and hands him her empty paper cup, which he takes and moves to stick it on top of his own in the cup holder. When he come back to face her he has one bracelet of the pair of cuffs hanging from his finger once more. “Sorry, but you’ll have to slip these babies on again.” He contorts his face in what she presumes is supposed to be a sympathetic expression.

The metal blinks in the burning Brazilian sunlight shining through the sun roof. Even with the air conditioning on she's sweating – she is much better at being cold than hot. Natalia glowers at the handcuffs before begrudgingly holding up her wrists together so he can snap them on. She doesn’t know what she's doing – she should incapacitate Barton, take his gun and shoot her way out of here. But then what? Go back to hiring herself out as an assassin? Retire and find herself a nice little place to settle down? Both ideas are repulsive – her hands have enough blood on them already, and she doesn’t know the first thing about domestic life.

“It’s only for show – the poor bastards will wet themselves if I let the infamous Black Widow walk around loose. I’ll take them off again once we get on the plane.”

She puzzles the man in front of her. This Barton is one of the oddest agents she's ever encountered. He has no professional respect for his colleagues, in fact, he interacts with her better than he does with them. According to Agent Williams, he has defied a direct order by bringing her in, alive. If Natalia had pulled the same stunt back when she was Red Room, or KGB, she would have been shot. She can't imagine what the consequences will be for him – the end of his career, possibly, for a start.

“You are risking a lot to bring me in,” she states once the second bracelet clips into place around her wrist. “I could be a double agent.”

He raises his eyebrow. “Are you?”

“No,” she frowns.

“Well then!” He slides around in his seat and flings open his door, slamming it shut behind him and wrenching hers open not a second after. He reaches around her to find the seatbelt clip and when he finds it already unfastened he gives her a grin, one that she returns wickedly with a hint of danger.

“You promise you're not a double agent?” He asks, helping her out of the car.

She stands on the concrete and blinks in the sunlight. The heat has hit her like a brick wall and she can see SHIELD agents surrounding them in a loose perimeter, each with a hand free to pull out a gun. A C-160 plane parked with the cargo ramp down clearly waits for them.

“No,” she answers, and marches into the belly of the beast.

They are greeted after they land on American tarmac by an intimidating man with an eyepatch.

“Good job, Agent Barton,” Director Fury congratulates, with a slightly smug smile on his face like he hoped this would be the outcome of his assassination mission all along. “But maybe next time, we keep the handcuffs on the highly trained enemy assassin at all times?”

Barton only shrugs. “You're the boss.”


	7. WASHINGTON D.C., 2000

“I used to work in a circus. I was a tightrope walker, but I had to quit – it’s not a stable career. My job was always on the line.” Barton says. They’ve been waiting in a debriefing room for about twenty minutes, which is nothing to Natalia after spending two days of being grilled by various agents and then a further three days locked up in one of SHIELD’s basement cells since Barton brought her in from Rio.

First assessment of SHIELD? There’s a lot of metal, a lot of tech, and a lot of people dressed in suits – it seems like they want to broadcast their super spy organisation status. The Red Room’s cover as a ballet academy worked because it actually was a ballet academy, full of mahogany and stone and mirrors.

Barton has visited her in her exile each day at totally random times, usually eating something, and she's found he's more intelligent than he looks even if he is a bit ridiculous. She doesn’t mean to evaluate him as much as her limited resources will allow her, but she can't help it. His eyes scan everything, though he doesn’t always pick up sounds – partial deafness from an explosion, or just bad hearing, she isn't sure. He hasn’t managed to catch her off-guard, which he seems disappointed about. She doesn’t tell him she doesn’t sleep much, and is easily roused from any rest she does get. Nightmares aren't her main problem – she worries about more real terrors; such as being trapped underground deep behind enemy territory. She's always been a very rational person, and she knows the odds are stacked against her if she chooses to fight her way out, which makes her uncomfortable. She's used to having the upper hand. The lack of power and control reminds her of her childhood; something she doesn’t like to think about.

That aside, she's not sure what unnerves her more – the hundreds of tons of concrete and metal above her head, or the fact that Barton thinks his jokes are hilarious.

On her third day in SHIELD – after they had finished their sloppy (by her standards) interrogation and escorted her to rot in a cell while they decided what to do about her – Barton had sauntered down the corridor around five in the evening, with a half-eaten green apple in his hand, chewing with his mouth open, the picture of casual though still dressed in his TAC gear. They talked about the weather in different countries – he, unlike her, enjoys the heat. He prefers the coolness of an iced beer than the scald of a strong vodka down his throat. She also got the impression that he's not overly fond of clothes.

The second time he came to see her it was two in the morning, and he had a box of pizza, though he didn’t share. She didn’t expect him to – she supposed it was a technique designed to establish dominance, though as he kept eating, tackling each piece with as much enthusiasm with the one before it, he could have just been hungry. She had moved everything in her prison – an ignored cot, a small table, and a lamp – five inches to the left, and she saw his eyes narrow slightly as he noticed. They sat in the same positions as they had the previous day – her in her permanent position of on the ground in the corner with the best sight lines, him spread-eagled on the ground on the other side of the bars. They talked about their favourite fighting moves – Natalia learned that he seems to be proficient in most forms, including Krav Maga, Jiu Jitsu and, surprisingly, Capoeira.

The third time he popped in it was at eleven thirty the next morning and he looked dead. Wearing sunglasses inside and taking sips of his coffee and bites of his soft pretzel like it was painful, they spent the time in companionable silence. She used the quiet to tap messages softly to him in Morse code with her nail on the ground, which he did not respond to, though he flinched when she pushed the table and made it screech against the wall – hence, Natalia’s deduction of partial deafness.

The fourth time, earlier, he was much more alert, and accompanied by five SHIELD agents.

“Oi, Natasha,” he had said, because she had decided not to put all her eggs in this ‘new leaf’ basket and given an alias – really just the English version of her name – to be on the safe side. “Time for the bird to leave the nest.”

She had pouted good-naturedly at him, thrilled to be getting out of her cage but not letting on.  If anyone else talked to her she would just glare, but she, surprisingly, likes Barton. She doesn’t normally get on with people so easily, but he takes whatever attitude she gives him and throws it right back, which she respects. She hasn’t been treated like a normal person in a while – really, ever. “And I was just getting comfortable…”

He had held up another pair of handcuffs from behind the glass. “We all gotta fly sometime.”

The amount of fuss it had taken to just get the cuffs on her wrists was laughable. Barton seemed content to just let her walk out and slip them on then, but one of the agents – clearly a commanding officer due to his bigger badge (another essential spy rule broken: differentiating higher ups from lower level employees made targeting a lot easier) with him had nearly had a heart attack and made her stand up against the wall like she was being arrested, even though she could have easily kicked him between his legs and knocked him out in a second. Barton clearly knew this, and had returned the fed up look on her face with an eye roll, which she appreciated.

They had deposited her in a debriefing room and left, though Barton stayed, and so did the handcuffs – and now she is hearing about his supposed failed circus career.

“But to be a tightrope walker you do not have the build,” she frowns. She has not spoken English in years – spending most of her time in eastern Europe and Asia over her freelancing career – so her speech patterns are a little skewed. It’s a problem she would normally get over by taking an hour and going to a public place to eavesdrop on local conversations; the only talking she's heard is Barton’s prattling, and half the time she's focusing on what he's said, trying to understand his ‘jokes’, rather than how he's said it.

“It was a joke.”

He was missing the usual tells. “You didn’t seem like you were lying.”

“That’s because he's used that pun so many times he practically believes it’s true.”

A young man in a black suit – another one – rests a small stack of folders on the table before sitting down in front of them, ignoring Barton’s whoop of ‘Phil!’ while miming a basketball jump shot, and addresses Natalia alone. “Afternoon, Ms Romanoff,” he says mildly as he reaches across the table to shake her hand. She holds up her cuffs but, unfazed, he takes one with a firm grip. “I'm Agent Coulson, and I’ll be your handler for the duration of your time here at SHIELD”

“Phil, your inner waiter is showing,” Barton snarks, but is ignored by both of them.

Barton would not need to be present for this briefing, unless…

“My handler?” Natalia enquires, with a sinking heart. “Or…”

“Ours, Tasha! We’re a team now!” Barton crows but she does not join in on his celebrations.

“This is not a good idea. I work alone.” She frowns.

“No disrespect, Ms Romanoff,” Coulson opens one of the files on the desk – her file. “But until Director Fury trusts you completely, you are here in a probationary capacity, which means no high stakes, solo missions.”

She scowls.

“So I am to be treated like a child – a babysitter, easy missions… I suppose you will be giving me toy weapons to use? The guns that shoot pellets, or like in cartoons, with flags?”

“No mission is easy.”

Natalia scoffs and tosses her hair back over her shoulder in contempt. “For me, most missions are.”

A voice sounds behind her. “You talk a big game for someone who is walking a thin line.”

The Director himself walks into her sightline, and signals for Coulson to leave the room – Barton goes with him without needing to be told. Fury looks more intimidating up close, when she can see the age lines on his face and the scarring around his eyepatch. His remaining eye is so dark it’s almost black, and fixes her with an icy stare. When he sits down in front of her, in Coulson’s seat, she gets the impression that she is suddenly under some sort of test.

“Please,” she scoffs again. “I am very efficient. You want to use me, I think. So, question is, who does SHIELD want dead?”

“You're gonna come over to our side, just like that?”

She was promised a chance to atone for her crimes, but she certainly won’t let Fury see this desire, this crack in her armour.

She waves a hand. “Killing for KGB, killing for SHIELD… what is the difference? Men die every day, some sooner than others. That’s life. “

“I suppose an agent such as yourself would see it that way. We at SHIELD are more inclined to keep people alive.

“When you were trained by the Red Room– yes, we know all about that,” he nods when he notices how her face turns pale at the casual name drop of something that was supposed to be off the books in Russia, “I’ll bet there was a lot of emphasis on killing people. The Red Room was set up to train young assassins in 1944 – of course, you're too young to remember all that.”

“Of course,” Natalia replies faintly. Even after all these years, the Red Room still holds a power over her she would never admit.

His eyes narrow at her reply, and it’s quiet between them until he speaks. “Natasha,” he says, leaning towards her with folded arms, as if about to tell her some great secret. “Forgive me, but how old are you?”

_Lie_. “Thirty-one,” she answers robotically.

He simply looks at her before withdrawing from her space to lean back in his chair. “And I wouldn’t suppose you’d be lying to me about that, now?”

She stays silent. He clearly knows – or at least, suspects – the truth, but years of training have instilled an instinct to remain mute under interrogation, and she's having trouble getting over it.

“Because we’ve got a lot of reports from over the years – various eye-witness accounts, low-quality security camera footage – of a woman matching your physical description sighted in several different countries all over the world. Do you know what all these reports had in common?”

She purses her lips.

“Each time this woman was seen; someone was murdered in the vicinity.”

She doesn’t like that, ‘someone was murdered’. She is well aware that her past isn't exactly one to be proud of but her missions were always about neutralising threats, for the good of the people.

“I killed the enemies of my country, only.” She blurts out, somehow needing to justify her actions as well as divert any blame. “For the glory of the Soviet empire, this is what we were told.”

“Not always. There were politicians and doctors and CEOs and military men– I'm going to say eight words to you: ‘Annual Prosthetic and Orthotic Surgeons Conference’, Japan, 1989. Ring a bell?”

Natalia betrays her panic with a blink. The conference means nothing to her but at the country and the date she's back in that room, with the stale quiet and the cold draft from the window and the full extent of her skills laid out in front of her like a bloody masterpiece. That was the mission that she remembers unsettling her, but she never contemplated the fact that those men hadn’t deserved to die. For years, the only way she has been able to satisfy her conscience and hatred of what she has been made into is that she uses her skills to do good and rid the world of evil people. The Director has blindsided her with his accusation. “I do not kill innocents,” she says with conviction. “Those were bad men.”

Though now she thinks about it, a place such as the Red Room probably toed the grey areas more than sticking to black and white. The blank spots in her memory sure don’t help to ease her insecurity (though it’s unlikely she’ll forget the horror of Osaka anytime soon).

“Keep telling yourself that, but to me the only bad thing they did was meet up for dinner and serve themselves up to you on a platter. You’ve got red on your ledger, Widow: innocent blood. SHIELD and I can help you wipe it clean.”

 

Somehow she gets cleared rather than thrown in a cell for the rest of her life, and joins basic training with the other new recruits – mostly ex-military – and Barton. She throws herself into training, not that she needs to – she wipes the floor with the rest of her class – and starts getting used to calling Barton by his first name, Clint, and him calling her Natasha. They're developing into an interesting partnership; their opposite preferences mean they complement each other in the simulations, and by extension, the field. Clint prefers a bird’s eye view of the scene; she likes to get in close. He likes a distance of a couple hundred metres between him and his targets; she values the establishment of a personal connection, however brief it may be before it comes to an abrupt end. Their roles are interchangeable – neither of them really have weaknesses – so if things go wrong for one the other can step in to give support.

The one thing they can never agree on is an extraction plan, but seeing as they both like to improvise, it isn't really a problem.

The other recruits are afraid of her, too intimidated by her reputation and her formidable skills to attempt to initiate a conversation, so she usually ends up talking to Clint, if only because he's a little shit and doesn’t look like he's going to soil himself every time she bares her teeth. They go to the canteen for lunch together in between training sessions (he seems to be off missions until she’s field ready); he starts bringing her a coffee in the mornings in the middle of week two and by the end of basic training he's even got her to genuinely laugh – something she can't remember doing in a while.

She's also noticed he wears hearing aids – confirming her deaf theory. It gives her an excuse to brush up on her sign language, which she does after her English sentence patterns are better than a native speaker’s. Once Clint realises she understands his gestures, he teaches her swears and ruder signs, which she doesn’t think she’ll ever need to know except when she's talking with him. The wordless communication lets them talk about people behind their backs and gives them the edge on infiltration and extraction drills, not that they needed it.

She has mandatory sessions with a psychiatrist, but they're irrelevant. Natasha’s ‘new leaf’ project does not involve giving away all her secrets, and she got rid of the trigger words the Red Room installed herself years ago over several months in Yakutsk with a crate of vodka and a small, red diary.

After her last sparring session before she becomes a probationary SHIELD agent – which wasn’t really a contest; the trainees have come a long way but she is the best in the world – she and Clint are going for lunch when he is stopped by a scientist and handed a black rifle case. Clint is ecstatic and immediately drags her into a deserted corridor and snaps open the tabs on the case.

“Finally, I’ve been waiting for this tech for ages!” He pulls out what looks to be some sort of tripod before opening out the legs and attaching a string from one end to the other and a weapon appears in front of Natasha’s eyes.

“A bow,” she comments. “How very… vintage of you.”

“Don’t be jealous because you haven’t got one, Nat,” he grins, plucking the taut wire and watching it vibrate with a gaze akin to infatuation. “A bit of work to assemble it, though. Probably not good for combat.”

She just stands with her hands on her hips, waiting until he stops drawing the bowstring and letting it snap back into place over and over again in between checking out the sight so they can go and she can eat. It’s macaroni and cheese day – also, the only day that the canteen serves hot food she can digest. “I’m sure you could ask your adversary for a five-minute break to get it set up in between getting the shit kicked out of you.”

It’s the first time she's sworn in front of him. He ignores the barb in favour of giving her an impressed look from behind his bow. “Ooh, look who’s got a dirty mouth.”

“You're a bad influence.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, _partner_.” He winks.

She shoots him a glance that would chill anyone with any sense to the bone – Clint just laughs.

“Partners with the Black Widow…” He shakes his head, letting out an airy whistle. “I got to choose my own codename. I'm going to be…” A pause for dramatic effect. “…Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye. She mulls it over, swirls it around on her tongue. It obviously more for his marksmanship than his awareness – this morning he walked into a door and spilt his coffee all over a poor, unsuspecting temp before they'd been in HQ twenty minutes. “How’d you come up with it?”

“It’s just an old college nickname,” he shrugs as he dismantles his new toy, but his eyes say differently. A group of agents pass them on their way to the canteen but all Natasha sees is portions of mac and cheese she isn't eating. She expects Clint to start chattering again, or to at least drag her to lunch, but it’s silent and when she turns to him he's looking at her expectantly.

“What?”

“Wow, Clint! What a great name! It really suits you! It’s so sexy, I'm practically coming right now!” He imitates a high-pitched voice that grates on Natasha’s ears – and sounds nothing like her voice, she vows – before dropping it and appealing, “C’mon, Tash, tell me what you think! Lay it on me.”

“It’s fine,” she says.

“Fine? FINE?! What do you mean, just fine?!”

Natasha quickly sees her mistake and tries to backtrack, wondering if it was karma for her past deeds that she's ended up with a giant man-child for a partner. “It’s a really great name, Barton, one of the best I've ever heard. The ladies will swoon, the bad guys will drop their guns and run at the sound of it.”

“You're just saying that,” he pouts, sulking. “I don’t need to be able to hear to tell you're being sarcastic.”


	8. WASHINGTON D.C., 2001

They have a rare five days off after completing their first real mission together – Natasha’s first experience of what it would be like to be a SHIELD agent. It was an easy brief – child’s play for two experienced spies but as soon as she stepped onto the plane to Buenos Aires she felt under a scrutiny that was only confirmed when Barton cornered her outside the bathroom cubicles and confessed he had orders to kill her if she showed any hint of going rogue. The test and its high stakes made her feel like she was back working for the KGB and the Red Room. They completed the mission in less than half of the expected time frame because she decided to show off, true to her old colours.

She's still on probation, but at least she feels like she's earned a gold star, even if Coulson’s not-impressed expression hadn’t budged an inch.

Clint chatters like a hyper-active squirrel when informed of their time off and she goes with it, following him out of SHIELD HQ after debrief and onto the street even though she's not bothered to listen to anything he's saying. It’s only when he's swapping with the driver of a standard issue black car that has pulled up against the curb that she pays attention.

“–seriously overdue, hibernation-worthy nap.”

She freezes, guessing he's talking about going home, a place she can't follow him to. She knows he has an apartment in the city with his wife-who-bakes-the-best-cinnamon-rolls-in-the-world-seriously-Nat-try-one and a dog-that-loves-pizza. He has a little family that he wants to spend time with on his own.

Natasha hasn’t really been alone without Clint since Rio but she's a grown woman – she was alone for years and can handle herself, even in a facility where people still look at her like she's the devil and send her death threats (she makes sure to find out who the senders are and get her own back in little ways like replacing their coffee powder with soil or ripping holes in all their pockets because she can't kill them and it’s the little things the make life worth living). She'll be fine.

She still has bad days – days where she's only a heartbeat away from carrying out plans that range from turning herself in to Interpol, the Russians, the Koreans (the list of agencies that want her dead is extensive), to plunging the stiletto permanently strapped to her ankle into her neck. But whenever she is about to do something there's a hand on her shoulder or a shot of vodka in front of her; Clint can always tell when she's a few steps from the edge and needs to be pulled back. It’s helpful but unnerving for someone who is a master at concealing their true selves and wearing a mask.

In that moment, she resigns herself to a week of relaxing in her SHIELD accommodation in between training sessions. Maybe she’ll try and synthesise some of the old poisons of her childhood for fun.

Clint slams the car door behind him before sticking his head out the window and giving her a dopey grin.

“What are you standing around for?”

She looks at him blankly. “What?”

“Get in! But I'm the driver, so I choose the tunes.”

Clint is inviting her to meet his wife and immediately Natasha can see red flags waving aggressively at how bad an idea this is. She's not the work partner you go for drinks with after a mission, she's the work partner you see on the job and only on the job. She's certainly not the kind you introduce to _family_.

She's trying to come up with an excuse that will get her out of this and not sound suspicious but she's coming up blank. Not willing to let it go so easily, she's been trying to hold onto her Black Widow persona of distant, lone wolf but Barton is making it almost impossible. Every time she makes a play, he either drags her anyway or calls her a wuss (which is almost worse, because it insults her pride).

Barton sees her falter (he's surprisingly good at reading people for someone whose people skills are somewhat lacking) and frowns. “I already had an agent go to your box of an apartment and pack you a bag–”

“You what?!” So, she's being dragged.

“–so just get in the car and deal with it.”

 “Fine,” she says coolly, exuding an air of indifference even though inside she's screaming. She stomps around to the passenger side, yanks open the door and falls heavily into the car with a huff, refusing to look at her partner. She feels like a petulant child, but Clint acts like one almost every day so she figures she's allowed.

“The agent told me what you keep in your underwear drawer. Swanky stuff, Nat.” Her mind immediately goes to the lace she owns but never wears – for missions, but she doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore – and she's mortified.

“Clint, you have a wife!”

“Yeah, I'm married,” he points out. “Not dead. Besides, I was talking about the vintage pistol and rounds, get your mind out of the gutter.”

“I wonder who put it there in the first place.”

 

Traditionally, whenever she's met a spouse it hasn’t gone well, but she's not on a mission and not sleeping with Clint so her nerves are unwarranted. She knows this but still, this is Clint – this is the first person to stick his neck out on the line for her, to believe that she is capable of good and willing to help her reach this potential. This is his wife; and despite it being so long ago and faint in her memory, she remembers what it is like to be tied to someone, heart and soul. She remembers the worry and fear she felt each time he stepped out the door, and the helplessness of having to rely on others to protect him. She is desperate to make a good impression, to live up to Clint’s faith and to prove herself a good partner in the eyes of the person it matters most to, the person who will be hurt the most if she fails.

Once Clint confessed to her he was married a few months ago, it was like the floodgates had opened and she was inundated with facts about his personal life. Not bragging facts, or information for the sake of information, but little off-handed comments that showed her that he and Laura – who was, as far as Natasha could gather, a civilian with no ties to SHIELD or any other intelligence agency – were very happy together.

When they turn into the underground parking of an apartment block, Natasha is relieved – not because she’s changed her mind, but because she’ll be able to get out of the car. It was a long drive and the whole time Clint had Seal’s ‘Kiss from a Rose’ on repeat, singing along with different harmonies on each playing. He also banks on corners too fast, but it’s mostly his singing that has annoyed her this time.

He doesn’t let her get out of the car until the song is finished, locking the car from the inside despite her scrabbling at the door handle. After that, it’s a climb of seven flights of stairs to get to the apartment on the top floor that leave her calves burning and her ready to kick her heeled boots off.

Clint bounds up the steps and fumbles with the key in the lock before he throws the door open.

“Honey! I'm home!”

A dark-haired woman comes out from behind a bookcase, carrying a wooden spoon. Her eyes land on Clint and flash with an emotion that Natasha places as a mixture of love and relief; her and Clint stride to each other, meeting in the middle of the room for a long, lingering kiss.

Natasha feels awkward. A cold, wet something bumps the back of her hand and she nearly jumps, instead looking down and seeing a dopey-looking golden retriever.

Her first thought: _basically Clint in dog-form_.

Clint and Laura are locked in an embrace, the former whispering into the latter’s hair, only stopping to press kisses to the side of her head.

Natasha focuses on the dog. She scratches behind his ears and he collapses at her feet, startling her.

_Блядь_ , she thinks, _I’ve killed their pet and I haven't even stepped in the door yet_.

She nudges it with her foot and it wriggles. A distinct feeling of relief floods through her.

“Nat, come meet my wife.”

Clint and Laura have separated and the woman she has heard so much about offers her a smile.

“Natasha! Clint has told me so much about you!”

She feels a flash of panic as she imagines all the secrets she's confided to Clint out in the open before he reassures her with a wink and, “Only the good stuff.”

 

“Laura and I met in middle school.”

They stay in the living area of the Barton’s apartment around a low coffee table, Clint and Laura sitting close together on the couch while Natasha had claimed a large armchair for herself. She’s listening to the story of how the pair had first met – she asked because she had an idea that it was what one did, when talking to married couples. Honestly, she isn’t especially interested. She had met her own late husband after a show when he brought her flowers backst– _no, that’s not right_.

However they had met, it clearly wasn’t very notable if she couldn’t remember it.

Tendrils of memory caress her consciousness, but she ignores them; now is not the time, not when she’s desperately trying to make a good impression.

“I basically fed him for a year before he did the most cliché thing a kid can do and ran away to join the circus.”

Natasha can't help raising an eyebrow – sure, he's mentioned performing in a circus before but after some confusion she had gotten the impression from others that he wasn’t being sincere. She wants to know more but Clint has that crease in between his eyebrows that he always gets when they talk about childhood so she lets it go. It’s what she would want him to do, if their roles were reversed.

“You were always a meddler,” he says fondly as he hooks an arm over her shoulders.

Laura pokes him in the ribs. “You didn’t seem to mind when you were tearing into a cheese and jam sandwich.”

He swats her away. Natasha watches their banter with the feeling that she's trespassing on something private.

“Babe, that reminds me, if Natasha is staying for dinner, we’re going to need more cream.” Laura says softly to her husband, but smiles kindly at Natasha.

“Oh, no, it’s fine–” she starts to bluster, because truthfully she feels out of her comfort zone and it’s a new and uncomfortable feeling. The Black Widow can deal with ambushes and bullets and bombs, but dinner with a co-worker and his wife? No thanks.

Clint insists though, saying the whole reason he brought her here is to stay with them for a few days and remind her there's a world outside SHIELD and missions. He pulls on a hoodie before grabbing his wallet, leaving with a promise to be back in ten minutes and a kiss to his wife’s cheek.

The slam of the door behind him ushers in an uncomfortable silence. Natasha doesn’t want to seem rude, but all her conversation topics sound false. She doesn’t want to treat her partner’s wife like a mark and can't think of anything sincere, so she stays quiet and pets the dog, who flopped at her feet again as soon as she sat down.

“Your hair is lovely,” Laura says out of the blue, after a few minutes of awkward silence have passed. “Is it naturally that red?”

Natasha drags up her small talk reserves. “Yes, but it gets darker the longer it grows.”

“It’s lovely. Have you always kept it like that?”

She knows what Laura’s doing – asking open questions with open body language, trying to draw Natasha out of her shell, and it’s working. The sound of her own voice gives her confidence and she has control of the conversation. She briefly wonders if the woman is studying psychology in college – she noticed there are a number of prospectuses in different positions on the bookcase separating them from the kitchen.

“I used to have,” a quick breath betrays Natasha’s uncertainty of the American slang she is about to use, “bangs, when I was younger.” Modern slang is like a whole new language for her to learn – luckily, Clint’s speak is littered with it, and she's picking it up quickly, but she always gets a little nervous when she's about to use a new term.

Laura smiles brightly and she files that word away for future use, triumphant in her success. “Aw, really? I bet you were really cute! I’ll show you something,” she whispers conspiratorially, “but you have to promise not to tell Clint I have this.”

Natasha swears and is soon met with what could only be described as a much younger Clint Barton with what looks like a hedgehog on his head.

“He has no clue that it even exists. Isn't it glorious?!” Laura asks, relishing both the photo and Natasha’s temporary loss of speech. “I found it in an old school yearbook, from before he dropped out. He doesn’t know I have it.”

“Is that…?”

“Yeah. His hair was really like that.”

 

They fall into an easy friendship after that. It’s gradual, but one day it startles Natasha to realise that Laura is her first real female friend in, well, ever. This isn't that impressive – she can count the number of friends she's had on one hand – but she grew up surrounded by girls and was taught the importance of femininity when needed and it only serves to further illustrate how wrong the Red Room was. It’s odd; they communicate in a way that she has only really used as a tool on missions: in giggles and raised eyebrows and jokes at Clint’s expense. They talk about food and hairstyles and the best ways to incapacitate an attacker because Laura may not be an agent but Clint’s taught her a few moves and she likes to think she can take care of herself and Natasha is well, Natasha. She even teaches Laura some new tricks that she tries out on her husband, much to his chagrin – he doesn’t like being ganged up on, especially when he’s the one who introduced them.

It’s sincere and its nice and she likes it; most of her conversations with Clint end up with them bickering, and while that still happens (she’ll be dead before she lets Clint give her attitude without getting it right back), Laura often puts a stop to their fighting before it can get out of hand. She has this way of smiling even when she's not smiling; her face is always open and bright whatever expression she wears. They become a little pack, like the Three Musketeers except two of them are married and none of them are French.

When Laura finds out she's pregnant, Natasha is the first to get the couple a congratulatory present: a small mobile (it has a Disney Robin Hood theme, but she yanks off the models of the fox and bear and hangs little cupcakes and hearts next to the bows and arrows).

Laura cries when she unwraps it, and even Clint gets a little misty-eyed (though he denies it vehemently).

She and Laura get in a fight two weeks later about her being too reckless on missions after she comes home with two broken ribs and a fractured arm from an arms dealer she decided to take on herself.

“He was going to rape that woman, Laura! What do you expect me to do, just let him do it because backup is seven minutes out?”

Laura furiously plumps one of couch cushions. Her three-month old belly is starting to peak out from under her shirt, but her mother hen instincts are out in full force. “I expect you to be realistic, and not nearly get yourself killed every time, Nat!”

“I don’t do that, do I, Clint?” She calls out to her partner on the other side of the room, who's eating orange segments in between casting worried looks at them.

“Of course–,” he starts, without thinking, before making eye contact with her and visibly backpedalling. “–you don’t…?”

“Clint!” Laura protests.

“Fucking hell, I'm getting out of here before I become collateral damage in this war. Call me when you’ve made up.”

He is summoned back two hours later with orders to pick up tabasco for his wife and a tub of ice-cream for each of them.

 

Natasha helps them move into their new farmhouse out in the sticks in anticipation of their new family member. Clint has already done much of the work, but the only room that is totally finished is the nursery – which he and Laura can't resist showing off to her and preening at her praise. It’s painted in a lush forest green with a big bay window shining light on a birch wood crib. It suddenly hits her that she's gone from being totally alone to Auntie-to-be in just over a year. A warm feeling appears in her chest at the thought. 

She catches a glimpse of herself in the long mirror as she walks past to inspect the view before she stops in shock. “Oh god, is that what my thighs look like from the side?”

“Whatcha on about now, Nat?”

“They're so fat!” She turns to check out the other side and yup, they're huge. It’s a good thing most of her wardrobe is black – she needs to stay away from those triple chocolate cookies they serve in the SHIELD canteen.

“Is this conversation really happening? You're gorgeous, and your thighs are killer – in more ways than one!” He laughs. “Geddit? Because you–”

Because she kills people with her thighs. Her best friend – the comedian. “I get it, Clint.”

“C’mon, that was funny!”

“You think your thighs are big? Look at this,” Laura steps beside Natasha, but only manages to fit her protruding belly in the frame. “I'm so large, I don’t even fit!”

“Because you're making a baby! The only thing I'm making is mistakes.” Natasha points out, resolving to stick to only one cookie a week… no, a day. She has to start off small.

“At least you don’t know the shame of eating pickles dipped in vanilla ice-cream at three in the morning. I'm terrified what kind of food preferences my child will come out with.” Laura shudders, then grimaces. “Oh, I shouldn’t think about pickles… Yesterday they were all I wanted; today they make me want to puke.”

“Excuse you, _our_ child. Half of that baby is mine, too,” Clint objects, from his perch on the dresser. He has a big grin on his face, one that has been permanently etched into his features since he and Laura found out she was pregnant all those months ago. The only time it’s slipped was when they were on a mission in Europe during one of her ultrasound appointments and he spent the whole trip down the Danube sulking and chewing his lip. As soon as they got into Belgrade that night he had spent two hours on the phone with his wife before breaking into Natasha’s hotel suite with a bottle of champagne, tear tracks down his cheeks and the news that he was having a son.

“Is it?” Laura waddles around to fix her husband with a glare. Her hormones have only made her sassier and as someone partial to dry humour and anything that will take her friend down a peg or two, Natasha can't get enough of it. “I'm the one who's been making this little bowling ball for seven and a half months now. Your job only took five minutes!”

Natasha snorts inelegantly.

Her best friend’s face turns a very bright shade of red before he mutters, primly, “More like fifteen.”

 

Later, when Clint is chopping wood for a fire outside with Lucky sniffing around the steadily growing pile, Natasha finds her friend staring at him desperately through the window of the nursery, one hand on her belly. It’s a sombre sight. There's always the chance of dying on a mission, but with the baby on the way, the fear of it has become stronger for all of them. Natasha has already talked about with Clint, and already vowed to herself that she would do everything in her power to ensure his return to his family.

“I know you're worried about Clint, Laura…” she starts, intent on comforting her.

“I'm worried about you too, Nat.” Laura interrupts, turning to face her. “You're my friend – I don’t want to see you get hurt. Besides, whenever Clint has been hit in the past, it usually sounds like he deserved it. You always pull him out of any serious trouble.”

Natasha laughs along with her because it’s true – most of the times Clint has been injured on missions, he was doing something stupid and giving her a heart attack in the process.

“Someone has to,” she shrugs as their chuckles die down.

“Yeah, someone does.”

A comfortable silence descends between them for a few moments before Laura says, quietly, “I'm glad you're out there with him, but I'm also glad he's out there with you. It’s good that you have someone to watch your back.”

Natasha stiffens at the comment – she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to people being concerned for her well-being – but manages to hide it with a cocky grin. “I don’t need anyone to look out for me.”

“I know,” Laura isn't fooled. She lays a hand on her arm and Natasha knows she's going to be a great mother because warmth spreads through her body from the contact. “But a second pair of eyes never hurts.”

Natasha puts her hand over Laura’s and squeezes before pulling away to go down and help Clint start a fire. Laura stops her in the doorway.

“I just want to say, I'm not sure if you were serious earlier about your thighs but you're being ridiculous. You're perfect the way you are,” she rushes out before pulling Natasha into an awkward hug that has her leaning over her belly.

The sincerity in Laura’s eyes makes her heart swell and she laughs into the embrace. The moment of insecurity has passed but the reassurance is welcome. “You're such a mom.”

“That’s the plan!”


	9. UKRAINE, 2009

Natasha loves driving. She loves fast cars, speeding through forests and fields with the wind in her hair and the hum of an engine at her feet.

She does not, however, enjoy playing chauffeur to obnoxious nuclear engineers with bad carsickness.

Nonetheless, a mission is a mission, and it’s the first one she's had in over three weeks after she fractured a couple ribs saving Clint’s ass in a fight with the mafia of somewhere or other.

Clint, of course, had walked out with nothing more than a scratch, the bastard.

Fury knows she heals abnormally fast, and though she has never explicitly told him the reason behind it, she knows he suspects something. It’s too big of a secret for her to divulge – she would rather keep it for when she needs an ace up her sleeve – and imagines he respects her obstinacy in not telling him, even when the signs of something unnatural are blatantly there.

He still keeps her off on mandatory recovery leave when she is injured, and when she's back, insists that she takes low-risk mission to ease herself back into the swing of things. It’s unnecessary, but Fury is just as stubborn as her and ignores her protestations.

The fog starts to thicken, night starting to set in as she drives past the stone quarry on her way to the safe house set up for them over the border. There's something eerie about the wind – it washes softly over her, brushing the hairs off her face as it breathes through the car window. It has a faint scent of pine and dirt and a heaviness she's not accustomed to.

The road narrows as it curves around the cliff of the pit and she slows appropriately, executing the tight turn with skill, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible. The last thing she wants is to spend the next two hours to the safe house with the smell of puke in her nostrils.

The engineer is a pain, and dry-heaves dramatically every time she pushes the car faster than 80km/hr. They would probably be on the other side of Odessa if not for Natasha’s concern for the leather seats.

Then there's a flash of silver in the corner of the rear-view mirror as the back tyres are shot out.

 

_James hadn’t come for her, hadn’t made contact with her, nothing. Natalia returns from Cuba sporting a tan and a few bruises more than she remembers getting. The whole trip was a whirlwind, and her memory is patchy from the bad concussion she received during a fight she can't recall._

_Back in the Red Room, Natalia dreams of broken vinyl and bloodstained curtains, but thinks nothing of it._

_Weeks pass, and Natalia completes two more ops with a righteous fury and deadly efficiency. Ivan interrupts her training to bring her into his office with an arm around her shoulders and a smile. There's an officer, handsome and blonde, waiting for them inside; Ivan introduces him as her fiancé. Natalia accepts the mission without question._

 

The car freefalls through the air, as if in slow motion, and Natasha can feel her pulse throbbing in her ears as she spider crawls over the front seat and into the back.

Impact is hard and fast – the car lands hood first on the uneven ground of the quarry before tipping over on its side; her neck whips back before her chin slams into her throat. A spray of glass douses her with shards, the tiny projectiles shredding her face and neck, one narrowly missing her jugular. The whiplash leaves her dazed. A high pitched ringing fills the air.

The engineer is groaning, she realises, once the whistle hushes to a background noise. The side of his head is bleeding profusely, his left shoulder has popped out of its socket and the seatbelt has cut into his gut, but he's alive.

Priorities, priorities. An acrid smoke has filled the air, and Natasha knows it’s just a matter of time before flames hit petrol and the whole vehicle goes up in smoke, with them in it. So getting them out of the car comes first. She’ll worry about the shooter later.

The side the engineer is strapped in on is against the ground. She’ll have to haul him up and over the side of the door, or she can try push him through the front window, which will involve getting him over the front seats and maybe setting him on fire. After taking a look at his abdominal injury, she goes with the second option.

She cuts the seatbelt and ties it around his back in an attempt to hold it in place and keep the bleeding to a minimum. The passenger seat’s recliner mechanism still works – she lowers it as far as it can possibly go before pushing the engineer onto the door of the car before scrambling past the central console to reach in and pull him forward towards the dash. As he moves, he yells out in pain.

“Sorry, pal, but you’ll thank me when we get out of this alive,” she grunts as he lets out another cry at a yank.

She manages to heave him up over the dashboard and get him supported, the window frame cradling him, as she vaults out of the car. She stumbles away when she lands, and the dirt ground swims a bit around her before righting itself. The smoke is getting thicker now, and darker, and she can actually see fire licking at the engine. Taking a few quick breaths, she goes back to lift the engineer out and over behind a ridge in the quarry face one hundred feet away. After dumping him as carefully as possible, she pulls out her gun from the holster on her thigh, looking around for the shooter while making a call on the comms.

“Coulson? Coulson?! Are you there?”

“Roman–”

There's a loud crack and Natasha hears more than feels the bullet go through her side and into the head of her engineer slumped behind her. The force of the impact causes her knees to go out from under her as red hot liquid soaks her clothes on both sides of her body. Without a bullet present there's nothing to slow the bleeding so after a few gasps to steel herself against the pain she takes off her jacket and attempts to tie it around her abdomen like a bandage. The action of getting her arms out of the sleeves pulls at her abdominal muscles and is so excruciating she nearly passes out, but she's dealt with this kind of thing before. She compartmentalises.

Usually unflappable Coulson is shouting in her ear. “Romanoff! What the fuck is going on?”

“Extraction, please,” she manages to get out weakly. “ASAP.”

“The package?”

“Terminated,” she's getting woozy. “I'm about to go the same way.”

“Keep talking to me, Natasha,” Coulson orders. “There's a quinjet on the way to pick you up, ETA six minutes.”

Natasha looks at the column of black smoke spiralling into the sky and appreciates it for acting as a beacon to her location. 

“Natasha? Stay with me.”

“Next time you have an easy mission, don’t come to me, alright?” Black spots swim at the corners of her vision, and she feels so tired she has to close her eyes. “I don’t know what your definition of easy is, but this isn't it.”

 

_The longer Natalia and Alexei’s marriage goes on, the less it feels like a mission. Her husband is charming and sweet, completely devoted to her, and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t happy._

_She can also tell he's distracting her. Her missions have been messier of late._

_Sometimes she dreams about a man, his opposite; one with dark hair and grey eyes who smiles so easily but takes so much more of her but there's never a name, only the face. He kind of reminds her of one of her teachers from her youth. It’s a dream she never remembers, though._

_“Она становится слишком близко!” She's getting too close!_

_Natalia can't tell through the heavy oak door who is yelling at Ivan when she goes to visit him, but the voice is laden with authority and ruthlessness and drowns out her mentor’s frantic excuses. “Я не хочу повторения того, что случилось с американцем!” I do not want a repeat of what happened with the American!_

_The door handle twitches, and she's on her way without a word._

 

“GSW, left lumbar region, possible bowel perf! Weak pulse, BP’s sixty over fifty-five.”

“Wheel her straight into surgery. Alright, I need six units of her blood type, prepped and ready!”

She's vaguely aware of the sound of swinging doors and squeaking wheels before whatever she's lying on hits against something and the jolt sends a huge bolt of pain through her and then there's nothing.

 

_Ivan disappears for two days before showing up cold and blue in the middle of the Moskva._

_The funeral is a solemn affair, the church filled with old men in uniforms and tearful women in elegant dresses, all politely ignoring the dodgy circumstances of his demise. Natalia attends, looking suitably tragic in her black dress and veil on Alexei’s arm, diamond flashing from where it sits on her gloved finger. They're a striking couple, and as Natasha says goodbye to the only father she’s ever known, through the black net no one can tell if her tears are real._

 

“She's going into shock!”

“Increase oxygen flow, start administering one unit stat. I can't close the wound until I take a look at the damage.”

 

_As the ever dutiful wife, Natalia goes to the airstrip to bid farewell to her husband, ignoring his CO’s and the techs scrambling to finish last minute checks._

_“Promise me you’ll be careful, Lyosha,” she begs, playing her part with little effort, worry in her eyes and a hand on his cheek._

_“For you, darling, I promise. Don’t worry, Nata. I’ll be home before you know it.” He kisses her palm, her lips, before sauntering off and swinging himself up into the cockpit of his jet. He salutes her through the window, and she pretends that the concern and warmth that has taken up residence in her chest isn't real._

_He taxis to the runway to take off and she waves goodbye from the tarmac, unaware that this is the last time she’ll see him alive._   

 

Natasha wakes up in a dark room to the sound of a steady beep and a view she recognises as the one from SHIELD’s med bay. She’s been positioned to lie tilted on her right side, bandaged left hip in the air. There's a faint throbbing feeling coming from it, a smothering sensation flowing through her that she recognises as morphine.

She takes in her surroundings out of habit. There's what looks to be a homeless man sleeping curled up on a chair in the corner of the room. When Natasha shifts on the bed a bit, Clint opens his eyes.

“Ow,” she says, simply. He unfurls himself to stand up and go to the door to call for a nurse, pulling his chair over beside her with a squeak as she has her vitals checked.

Clint waits until the nurse is gone to speak. “Christ, Nat…” he says hoarsely, and she can hear the worry in his voice before he clears his throat. “You look like shit.”

“Bastard,” she swears fondly, before admitting, “I feel like shit.”

“Maybe next time, don’t almost get yourself killed?”

“Stellar advice, Hawkeye, I’ll keep it in mind.”

She hasn’t seen her best friend since the Mafia incident – and once she was cleared with no serious injuries, Clint was off again on another mission, trying to rack up as many as possible to be eligible to put in a request for a long holiday. Cooper’s birthday is next week, and since he missed last year’s taking care of a drug baron in Argentina, his dad is pulling out all the stops.

Natasha has his present ready to go in her apartment – an impressive looking nerf gun and a barrel of foam bullets, the best recommended by the toy store. She also has something for Lila in interests of fairness, but she doubts the two-year-old will really appreciate the doll and rather see it as something else to chew on.

“When were you going to tell me?” Clint asks.

“Tell you what, Clint?” She asked, tired.

“That you put me down as your next of kin on your medical forms? I got a frantic call from Coulson at four AM yesterday morning, Laura nearly had a heart attack.”

Natasha rolls her head back to stare at the ceiling. She’d forgotten about that. HR wouldn’t let her get away with leaving it blank. “I'm sorry, Clint.”

“Sorry? Nat, don’t be sorry.”

Natasha focuses on a spot on the ceiling to avoid looking at him. “You and Laura are kind of the only people I have, so if anything happened to me… I guess I would want you to know.”

“Aw, Nat…” he coos.

She screws her eyes shut. “Don’t do it, Clint,” she warns. “Don’t make it weird.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever implied about me.”

“I’ll take it back.”

“Too late!”

 

The next person to walk in the door is Fury himself, Maria Hill at his heels. He looks as impassive as always, though Natasha thinks she sees his eyes narrow slightly as he takes in her battered and bruised form. “Nice to see you're still alive,” he says, coming to stand at the end of her bed with his arms crossed.

“Thanks for the concern, sir. Where’s Coulson?” She wants to thank him. She owes him.

“Taking care of things.” 

Silence falls, only interrupted by beeps that mark her heart rate. She's waiting for one of them to start talking shop; Fury doesn’t do social visits.

“Do you have any intel on the shooter?” Clint asks, business-like, starting them off. Hill shakes her head, opening her mouth to speak but Natasha already knows what she's going to ask.

“It’s no use,” she sighs. “I never got a visual on them.”

The silver flash comes to the forefront of her mind before she pushes it away, attributing the vision to a severe concussion and blood loss. The Winter Soldier hasn’t been seen for twenty years. She's suspects she's getting paranoid in her old age. Right?

Clint leans back in his seat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Nat,” her best friend begins, “But why didn’t they just kill you?”

“Maybe they thought they did,” Hill suggests, but Natasha shakes her head. She's already thought about it.  
“I wasn’t the mission. That was how I used to work, before SHIELD. It minimises mess, sends a message…”

“We got the message, alright.” Fury mutters darkly, then addresses Hill. “I want agents searching the scene. Find me something that will lead to the shooter.”

“Yes, sir.” She pulls out a phone and leaves the room.

“And you,” Fury jabs a finger at Natasha. “You are going to take an extended medical leave. No buts,” he insists when he sees her open her mouth, ready to protest. “I don’t want to see you in HQ for at least another two months.”

Natasha’s eyes nearly bug out of their sockets. Two months?! What the hell is she supposed to do for two months if not work?

Fury sees her reaction and smiles grimly. “It seems it might be time for you to get a hobby, Agent Romanoff.”

Cue dramatic exit.

Natasha groans.

“Maybe you should take up knitting,” Clint suggests, breaking the silence that ensues.

She turns her head to look at him. He looks tired, with dark circles under his eyes. “I’d rather kill you with the needles.” She mimes a stabbing motion, and groans as it pulls on her abdominal muscles.

“Yeah, maybe no killing for a while,” her best friend remarks drily.

She sighs. It’s going to be a dull two months.

“Laura’ll go mad if I don’t drag you back home with me.” He leans back in the chair and swings his foot up across his knee in a casual move. “She’s prepping the guest room as we speak. The barn roof needs fixin’, and I have to build a chicken coop. Two pairs of hands’ll get the job done much quicker…”

“Whoa, Barton, buy a girl a drink before you try to take her home with you,” she raises her eyebrow as she speaks, and smiles when he gives her a sarcastic laugh. 

She comes to a decision, decides it's worth pursuing, just in case. She waits a minute before she speaks, hesitant for Clint’s reaction. “What if I told you I might have a lead on the shooter?”

“I’d say tell me in two months.”


	10. DONETSK, 2010

They land the Quinjet in a forest a few miles outside the town and ‘borrow’ a truck to take them right into the centre. It’s an old army truck, the kind with half wooden sides and a canvas stretched in a roof-like shape. There’s a dirty coat on the passenger seat, which Natasha shrugs on over her catsuit; Clint pulls out a creased trilby hat from the glove box and they're all set. They follow their coordinates to an abandoned warehouse, the perimeter marked by a tall, chain-link fence with barbed wire spun around the top to deter climbers. They do a quick drive around, checking if the building is really deserted before parking their vehicle in an inconspicuous alleyway off the north-facing side, where they can see a small side door in the wall.

“Do you know where you're going?” Clint asks quietly as they step out of the truck and stroll over to the fence, appearing as if they're just having a casual conversation as he begins to cut each of the wires with a pair of wire cutters to make a Natasha-sized hole for her to crawl though.

“Here’s hoping. You?”

“Up on the roof of that building there,” he flicks his eyes up and she follows his sightline over to an apartment block, just as dilapidated as the warehouse. “I can swing down the fire escape when you're coming out.”

The metal ladders and balconies covering the outside of the building as a ‘fire escape’ don’t look very safe or sturdy to Natasha, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Aw, shit,” Barton swears, and she snaps her head around, hand flying to the gun on her left thigh not so brilliantly concealed by her coat.

“What?!”

Clint grins up at her, sucking on his finger. “Nothing, just a scratch.”

She punches him in the shoulder. “Get a move on, dumbass.”

He gives the wire a brief pull apart, stretching out the hole. “Think you can fit your fat ass through there?”

This time, Natasha goes for his gut. “Jerk,” she mutters, squeezing through, ignoring the sharp jabs of metal into her body and trying not to get her hair caught. Once she's in, she turns back to face him, pleased to see him rubbing his stomach. “Comms on?”

“Yep,” he taps his earpiece three times – she does the same after hearing the three clicks. He pulls a face at her to show he's heard them too and they part with the usual sentiments.

“Extraction plan?”

“They're only for suckers.” They both smirk at each other. Years of working together as STRIKE Team Delta have given them bad habits that would probably kill anyone else in the field – the lack of an extraction plan, or any plan in general, is a huge no-no for any team, but they're not just any team. They're the best. “See ya later.”

“Don’t die… or I’ll have them etch ‘Clint Farton’ into your tombstone.”

“No…!”

Natasha runs up to the door with a smug grin, proud of her threat – a bad joke worthy of Clint Barton. After picking the lock and entering the building, she watches him enter the apartment block safely and closes the door shut behind her.

The warehouse is empty, and dark, and she can hear the rats scurrying as her steps echo on the cold concrete ground. She quickly softens up, walking toe to heel like in ballet, and pops on of her glow sticks so she can see where she's going. The ceiling is ridiculously high above her, and a cold wind blows through as she explores, indicating broken or open windows. The whole space is open, like a cargo house, but she can see patterns of lighter squares on the ground that remind her of the mats she used to be all too familiar with.

There's a second floor above her – she can see stairs to her left – but she needs to cover this level first, to make sure it’s clear. It’s annoying because she's almost sure what she's looking for won’t be here – if she had a TAC Team with her she would leave them and continue on up by herself. But it’s just her and Clint, whose heavy breathing she can hear loudly in her ear.

Sure enough, the only rooms on this floor turn out to be a mouldy kitchen and bathroom that probably has developed a new form of life with all the bacteria in it so finally, Natasha gets to creep up the stairs and do some real investigating.

Level Two is more of office orientated than the ground floor; glow stick in one hand, gun in the other, she makes her way down the corridor, clearing each room before proceeding to the next.

“Hey, Nat, look out the window.”

The hall is lined with windows on one side; she peers out the grimy glass, gun cocked, expecting to see the enemy but instead sees Hawkeye in the apartment block opposite her, giving her an explicit view of his middle finger.

“Not mission appropriate!” she hisses, before adding, “If I didn’t have my hands full I’d sign-curse you. Why aren't you on the roof yet?”

He gestures at her through the window to something she can't see and his voice pops in her ear. “Excuse you, there's like seven hundred floors in this goddamned building. And I'm injured. I'm getting there.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. According to Clint, paper cuts are worth a trip to the hospital and everyone within a mile radius knowing all about his pain. “Well, get there faster!”

Each of the rooms has looked interesting so far but Natasha knows she's struck gold when she sees the decor. It’s the last office to check on her hallway so she decides to bite the bullet and presume the rest of the floor is deserted as well. The office is the biggest one of the lot, and the large mahogany desk has the unmistakeable skull-and-tentacles flag on either side of it.

She puts the glow stick pride of place standing upright on the centre of the desk and circles it, inspecting it, finding a safe built into the right side. It’s a big, old fashioned, lead-lined safe – her favourite. 

“Tasha, it hurts.” As she shrugs off her coat and settles down to work, Barton’s voice crackles over the static of her comms and Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Clint, I'm trying to crack a safe, here.” She has her good ear – the one without the earpiece and best friend’s whines – up against the mechanism as she twists the dial of safe slowly, waiting for the glorious ‘click’.

“But it’s really sore.”

“It barely qualifies as a flesh wound.” _Click_. One number down.

“It _stings_ , Natasha. What if I need a tetanus shot?”

“You scratched yourself on a wire fence, not a rusty nail. And before you ask, you're up to date on all your vaccines.”

“I am?” _Click._ One more to go…

“Yes! Now, shut up, I've almost got this.” A bit more tweaking and the safe pops open to reveal its hidden treasure – stacks and stacks of files and papers. Natasha takes a moment to curse HYDRA for not digitising their systems yet and starts scanning for dates, names; anything related to Captain America. She goes through two boxes, then three – but nothing. She can hear a couple pops of what could be gunfire; Clint grunts and swears under his breath a few times over comms before there’s a boom and he bellows, “We’ve gone live out here, Nat!”

Natasha winces and puts the earpiece back in her ear after scrabbling to take it out when Clint first started yelling. “No need to shout!” She scolds. She had dropped all the files she had been sorting through in surprise, and now pages of reports and tables litter the floor.

“Sorry: explosion. Think you could hurry it up a bit?”

“I’ll do my best, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And before you say it, don’t tell me to use a magnet, I don’t need to come out of this with a greater desire to punch you in the face than normal.” She drags the pages together, trying to keep them in the order they were before, stacking them back up and picking off all the trails of dust that tagged along.

“Alrighty then, your majesty.”

She's attempting to get all the pages in a neat pile when a heading grabs her attention – ЗИМНИЙ СОЛДАТ. WINTER SOLDIER. It’s a folder, and when she opens it, there he is, his face in the window of what looks like a cryotank, asleep but far from peaceful. She has to touch the picture, calling from her memory the feel of his cheek as she ran her fingers down his face – memories of him have started to haunt her like ghosts. Not all of them make sense yet, like how she knows exactly the feel of the stubble on his cheeks and the curve of his jaw. As soon as she finds him, she is going to punch him in the face for shooting her, the asshole. Then she's going to beg him for answers.

The photo stares accusingly up at her from the file. It’s the second time she's run into him in Ukraine – in a manner of speaking – but hopefully she won’t be coming out with a hole in her side this time.

She glances through the rest of the file, and considering the lack of information they currently have on him, it’s a goldmine. She walked in looking for Department X bases and is coming out with what is probably the most comprehensive history of the Winter Soldier in existence. It has taken her over a year to find.

After that, she forgets all about keeping calm and collected and searches frantically for anything else on James. Any pages with his name on it are shoved into the folder – the rest are tossed back on the pile. She's less methodical and more desperate, throwing the finished pile of collected pages from the ground back into the safe and pulling out the next box so it spills all over the floor. She almost manages to go through all of its contents when a spray of bullets hits the wall behind her, narrowly missing her head. She throws herself to the side, scrambling to the safe and pulling its door wide open to block any more attacks.

“What the hell, Barton?” she barks, pulling out her glocks and ducking around the side of the safe door to shoot at her attackers. Two men, with Uzis. One falls, the other hides behind the doorway. She waits until he comes out again before she shoots him in the head.

“Yeah, sorry, my bad,” he tries not to groan, but she can hear it in his voice. “Two guys, heading your way,” he croaks, belatedly.

“Are you shot?!”

“No! Maybe… Yes. I'm fine. I've been shot before – so have you, you know how it is.”

Natasha scoops up all the pages and shoves them back in the safe and swings the door shut, spinning the dial so it locks again. She grabs the file and shoves it in her belt protectively against her stomach.

“Yeah, but it isn't like a rusty nail – you can't build up an immunity to bullet wounds!” She snatches the glow stick tucks it in against the file. “I'm on my way. Are you out of commission?”

“No, it’s just my shoulder. I can cover you to the truck, but I won’t be able to swing down.”

She clears the corridor and, stepping over the bodies without a second thought, runs along with both her guns in her hand to the stairs. “How do you feel about jumping?”

Clint grumbles, catching her meaning instantly. “I hate jumping off buildings. The whiplash makes me dizzy.” Another couple men come running at her when she sprints from the door and she manages to slip both her guns back in their holsters and pull out her garrotte – she prefers agility over powder burns in close quarter combat. It’s more difficult to incapacitate five men with a file and a light strapped to her stomach but she manages, taking out the last two with her new Widow’s Bites. “Yeah, alright. What’s your ETA?”

“… About five minutes. Hope you're ready to cover me, I'm coming out.” She's vaguely aware of her partner cursing before she throws open the door to hell.

An explosion rocks the ground but gives her cover to run to the fence. She hears more than sees the enemy agents falling around her to Clint’s arrows as she tries to concentrate and slip through the fence in one piece and not get caught. The change of shape around her middle and the lack of someone to wrench apart the steel wires and widen the gap for her makes it more difficult to cross to the other side than she anticipated. 

“Widow, not to rush you or anything, but I'm running out of ammo up here…”

“Just a second, I'm nearly there!” She's just got her head left to extract when she sees a shape with gun pointing her way and has to duck as a bullet whizzes over her. She manages to get one of her guns out and shoot the offending form from the weird angle but the sudden movement has caused her hair to tangle in the wires so when she yanks her head free of the fence she nearly pulls out a chunk of hair by the root. “Ублюдок!”

“Come on, Nat!” She growls at her partner over comms and fiddles with the strand caught in the wire while he shouts at her constantly. “Get to the truck! Time to go, come on!”

Finally, she gets free and sprints to their vehicle and throws herself into the driver’s seat, turning the keys they’d left in the ignition and tossing her glow stick and the folder onto the passenger seat. She calls out a confirmation to Clint and swerves out onto the road to see him do a swan dive off the roof of the apartment block.

In spite of it all – the bullets, the explosions, the adrenaline, the file with the Soldier’s photo in the seat beside her – she takes a second to think about how much of an idiot her best friend is before he pulls out his bow and shoots a grappling arrow into the side of the warehouse, when she has to time the moment she meets him with the truck and catch him on his swing.

It’s lucky that the roof of the container on the back of the truck is made of canvas because Clint comes crashing through, and the moment Natasha is sure all body parts – arms, legs, head, bow – are safely inside the ride is the moment she puts her foot down on the accelerator.

She can hear his groans both over comms and from the back of the truck as she veers from street to street, trying to lose their tail. After a couple of minutes or so, Clint pulls back the screen on the hatch between the trailer and driver.

“You alright?” he grunts, and yelps when a sharp turn causes him to slam his head into the side of the hatch.

“I'm great! I love getaway driving!” Natasha takes her eyes off the road to beam at him and nearly takes out a traffic light. “I don’t get to do enough of this!”

“Alright, Dom Torretto,” Clint chuckles, pulling himself up with one arm and climbing awkwardly into the passenger seat through the hatch. Natasha snatches the file out from under his ass and wedges it between her thighs. “What have we got?” He adjusts the rear-view mirror to have a look.

“Just a car and two motorbikes, but we’re going to have to ditch the truck – it’s too conspicuous. How’s your shoulder?”

“Just torn muscle. Left the bullet in. If we detach the trailer, it might slow ‘em down.”

“Do it.”

They just about destroy a street but they manage to lose the HYDRA agents on their trail and start the hike back to the Quinjet, bruised and bloodied. Clint is clutching his arm with the wounded shoulder to his chest and Natasha does the same to folder.

“Did we at least get what we came for?” Clint asks her crankily as they trek through a muddy field in their combat gear.

Natasha shakes her head. “No,” she smirks. “We got something even better.”


	11. RURAL IOWA, 2012

“Tasha?”

“Out here!” she calls, not lifting her eyes from the pages of her book. The weather is too hot for a normal May afternoon and the cicadas provide a loud background of white noise for Natasha to get lost in the fictional world of today’s story – some mystery novel Laura plucked off the shelf and told her she had to read because it was so good and full of plot twists. She is always trying to find interesting novels or films that will surprise Natasha but the simple matter of it is that she is trained to look out for these things and can often see a film’s serial killer within the first ten minutes of them being introduced. With the books it can be harder, so if she's really struggling she reads the last chapter and pretends she knew when Laura asks. It spoils the climax of the story but her the fact her friend cares so much to get frustrated every time is one of her guilty pleasures. She feels important when Laura comes back with a stack of books and movies and professes that this time for sure Natasha will be surprised.

This book is not living up to its promise – Natasha was only seventy pages in when she guessed who the killer is, a guess which Laura inadvertently confirmed when she huffed and said she was going out shopping and would be home later in the evening. Sitting out on the cushioned bench on the porch gives her the benefit of the small breeze while letting her casually survey the perimeter and the driveway, the only way on and off the property, for peace of mind. The bench has become Natasha’s Reading Bench, and though she suspects Clint knows exactly why she's chosen it, he hasn’t said anything.

“What are you reading? Another trashy romance novel?” The man of the house lets the screen door fall shut behind him and Natasha is stuck with how different he is out here than when they're at work, or even in the city.

Clint looks relaxed and well rested, and his eyes don’t immediately scan his surroundings every few minutes. He's a little goofier, a little milder mannered. He doesn’t swear half as much, except if he's working on that damn tractor that Natasha is tempted to permanently destroy, it’s so obnoxiously loud.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation of all: he wears flannel. City Clint would laugh at the idea of owning anything other than dark clothes and leather jackets but Farm Clint lives in bright blue jeans and various differently coloured shirts. The first time Natasha saw him dressed like that she couldn’t stop gaping for five minutes – an action he was quick to take as a compliment and preened himself until she got over his style change and hit him over the head with a packet of spaghetti.

“More like a manual of What Not to Do If You Want to Get Away with Being a Serial Killer; honestly, the bad guy in this is so clueless it’s almost embarrassing.”

Clint opens his mouth to reply – with some sly dig no doubt – when the screen door slaps shut again and Cooper is standing on one leg in front of it, trying to pull on his left shoe.

“Ready to go, dad?”

“Sure bud, I’ll meet you in the truck.” Clint ruffles his son’s hair before gently pushing him in the direction of the beaten red Ford parked haphazardly in the drive.

Natasha’s eyes narrow and she looks at him questioningly, setting down her book in her lap. “Going somewhere?”

“So the tractor broke down. Again. Me and Coop are going into town to look for spare parts to fix her up–”

“Clint…” she warns.

“– and I was hoping you could watch Lila for a bit.”

“No, no, no, no,” Natasha quickly protests, standing up after tossing the book aside. There are some things that she will not and should not do, and being around children is one of them. It took a lot of convincing from Laura and a lot of arguments with Clint for her to agree to visit them on the farm once the children were around and even so she avoids spending one on one time with them as much as possible. They're great kids: she hears all about their exploits from the parents and how well they're doing in school and how Cooper refuses to eat broccoli and Lila leads the ants out of their house with trails of sugar in attempts to save them from Clint’s bug spray attacks but inadvertently makes the problem worse. She is very fond of them, as much as she is fond of their parents. They are clearly a very happy family.

However, Auntie Natasha prefers to remain on the sideline. A grown-up who sends them huge presents on their birthdays and Christmas and Thanksgiving and their half-birthdays and spoils them rotten from a distance. She doesn’t like being left alone with kids. She doesn’t think she should be – she doesn’t know what to do, what to say, how to act. She was always an assassin; she doesn’t remember being a child.

So when she stays over, she hangs out with Laura, or works with Clint, or trains in the barn. She avoids the house except for meals and after bedtime and reads a lot. Children, she has found, are less likely to seek you out if you aren't in their line of sight often. It hasn’t always stopped them, of course, but it makes the situations that much easier to control.

But playing babysitter is something she should never do.

“It’ll be fine!” Clint exclaims. “Lila’s a good kid, she won’t bite or scratch you–”

Natasha can't say the same for herself.

“–she’ll just sit there and play with her toys and if she wants something she's under instructions to yell for you, all you have to do is check on her from time to time and make sure she hasn’t choked on one of her dolls’ shoes or something.”

Her head almost explodes. She is to be left with a child that might try to kill itself?! “What?!”

“It’s fine, it only happened once!”

“Clint, do not make me responsible for the life of your child!”

“We’ll be two or three hours max, and you have my cell number, and Laura’s is on the fridge.” Cooper sounds the horn and Clint turns to wave at him. “Coming buddy! Ok, thanks Tash, owe you one!”

“Clint, I didn’t say yes! Don’t you dare…” Her calls fall on deaf ears. Clint jogs out to the truck and catches the door swung open for open by his son. They pull out of the driveway with a smile and a wave, leaving Natasha staring after them, quietly fuming. She watches until she can't see them anymore before smacking her hand on the rail of the porch.

“Goddamnit, Clint!” she swears. She feels totally out of her depth, and he's only been gone fifteen seconds. There is a child in the house and it will be her fault if anything happens to it.

Suddenly the idea of getting Lila a doll house with lots of tiny pieces of furniture seems like the most terrible gift idea she's ever had.

“You swored!” A tiny voice exclaims gleefully behind her and she whips around to see the little lady in question on the inside of the screen door with her nose pushed up against it. Her princess crown – to match her dress – is falling haphazardly down her head and Natasha watches as a chubby little arm reaches up and jams it firmly back on, as if denying it freedom.

“Oh, um… hey there, Lila,” she fumbles before crouching down, smiling awkwardly with her mouth closed and body language open, subconsciously trying to communicate that she is not a threat. Not many things faze the notorious Black Widow, but apparently a toddler is one of them. “What’s up?”

“I need someone to fill up the teapot for my tea party.” Lila commands, her cheeks rosy pink as she smiles a gap-toothed smile at her ‘Auntie Nat’.

“Okay, no problem, uh… let’s go do that.” She walks cautiously to the door and waits until the little girl is halfway down the hall to kitchen before opening it and sidling through. When she gets to the kitchen, the Lila is there, holding up a yellow plastic teapot with Disney stickers that have started to peel off on the sides. Natasha takes it gingerly and puts it beside the sink on the counter.

She fills the kettle and switches it to boil. “What kind of tea, sweetheart?” she asks, opening and closing cupboards before finally finding tea bags – they’ve been banished to the back of one of the bottom shelves behind several stacks of coffee powder and filters. The kettle has started to steam. “Never mind that, looks like there's only one kind. Is that ok?”

When she turns to look at Lila she has one tiny fist shoved inside her mouth and Natasha nearly has a heart attack before she realises that she's trying to stifle her giggles, not choke herself to death in the absence of doll accessories.

“Not real tea, silly! Water!” Lila admonishes when she stops laughing. Natasha feels strangely embarrassed.  “Haven't you ever had a tea party before?”

“Nope, this is my first one.” Natasha confesses, and Lila looks at her incredulously, cocking her head to the side and squinting but remaining cute as only five-and-a-half year olds can.

“What did you play when you were little?”

“Well, I actually didn’t do a lot of playing.” At least, not playing in the traditional sense. Natalia and her sisters used to play-fight until they were told to drop the ‘play’ aspect and concentrate on the kill.

Natasha runs the tap and fills up the teapot halfway with cold water before reaching over to turn off the kettle, left bubbling away.

“What did you do then?”

Natasha turns and leans against the counter, facing the little girl, and struggles to think of something PG to say. “I danced.”

“Like dad when he drinks beer?”

She smirks. “Definitely not like your dad. I was a ballerina.”

Lila’s eyes – the same shape and colour as Clint’s though she's got Laura’s eyelashes, the lucky thing – go as wide as saucers and her mouth drops open. It would be comical if not for the look of pure awe that has spread across her face. The crown has fallen to the floor, forgotten.

“A ballerina?! Show me!”

They dance around the kitchen island Clint installed two years ago when he finally got to come home after a four-month operation in the South China Sea. Natasha finds the family iPad and pulls up videos and music and shows Lila parts of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, before teaching her the basics like hand and feet positions. When she attempts to show her what en pointe means, Lila makes her hold her up so she can see what it’s like balancing on her toes. It’s the first time Natasha has touched her since she was a baby. 

Then she gets a call.

When Clint and Cooper get back Lila flies at her father, clutching his trousers and begging for ballet lessons. Clint picks her up, whirls her around and sends her running back into the sitting room with a promise to talk to Laura about it later. Cooper is sent off to check on the horses and Clint joins Natasha on the porch, to where she has retreated.

“I meant to finish off fixing that fucking tractor so it wouldn’t be such a struggle taking the hay in.”

“So you got a call too?”

“New Mexico. You?”

“Russia. Solo op.”

They're silent for a moment, each contemplating what’s ahead of them. Natasha is going back to what she knows: Russia and corrupt bureaucrats and some of that is a comfort but there's always a risk. It will be nice not to be in a warzone, however – she's better at the stealthier, more delicate type of combat. She is a spy, not a soldier.

“No matter how long we get; it never seems enough.” Clint sighs, and she realises he's turned from the scenery to survey the house; his home. She can see him eyeing Lila through the window, practicing her ballet moves in front of Cooper, who has clearly ignored his dad’s instruction instead to become a reluctant audience and keeps picking up his Nintendo, only to be hassled by his younger sister to watch her.

“Starting to go soft, are we?” She can't blame him for wanting to stay with his family but Natasha also knows that Clint could quit anytime; he just chooses not to. As much as he doesn’t say it, he enjoys the high-risk nature of the job as much as she does. Both of them haven't done things they're particularly proud of in the past, and redemption is a big part of why they do what they do; but there is no denying that there is nothing like the adrenaline rush after a near-death experience. It vaguely worries her, as there is an almost eighty percent chance that chasing that high is going to get him killed. She would be worried for herself but she honestly just couldn’t care less – it’s all about the fix.

The day she realised this, she knew it was too late for her. It’s worse than a drug: it’s the only life she's ever known.

“Nah, you know me. Just looking at that,” he points above them to the roof of the porch. There's a bit of mould around the corners and the slats aren't looking as young as they once did. “Might rip that off next, stick a new roof on… maybe reinforce it and make a balcony for Laura to paint on. She's always wanted a higher view of the fields.”

Natasha nods. “Good idea. Sounds like a lot of work though.”

“Well, you know, if you ever feel like lending a hand…”

“To do the heavy lifting?” She jokes, and her best friend manages to crack a smile. He hates when they have to go on separate missions – they both do. They work best together; there's no one Natasha trusts more to watch her six than Clint. Solo ops are always the longest missions, which means more time for mistakes, more time to get yourself killed. She sobers at the idea of one of them being killed because the other wasn’t there. “Have to make it back first.”

“I will if you will. Don’t make me have to drag my ass out to Russia to rescue you – you know I hate the cold.”

She scoffs. “As if I ever need rescuing.” But she looks up at him to find his eyes. “Deal.”


	12. NEW YORK, 2013

Every time Natasha pulls up to the quaint house on the corner she feels that something is going to happen at any minute that will shatter her attempt at domesticity.

She's never had a real house before – one that is under her name and isn't just a cover. She can choose whatever she wants to put up on the walls, she can choose the furniture, she can even choose the cushions and they don’t even have to match if she doesn’t want them to. It’s a weird feeling of complete control she has never experienced before.

That said, she hasn’t acted on it. One benefit of living in Queens is that Steve, refusing to budge from Brooklyn, is only a short drive away and he has already paid several visits and attempted to get her to inject a bit of her personality into the house; as it is now, the walls are bare and white, the cushions on the couch all match and any furniture that is in the house at all is sparse and purely functional. He is still a little unsure about the neighbourhood – even though she reminds him that it’s her that would be a threat to muggers, not the other way around; and anyway, there's a park beside the house and she's surrounded by elderly couples so it’s not really an issue in the ten feet from her car to the front door.

Clint stops by every time he is in the city and not on the farm – he even stays with her occasionally. Those days are nice, and she usually ends up drinking her morning coffee to the soundtrack of his loud, off-key shower singing. The house doesn’t seem so scary when it is permeated by yelling that is – she guesses – supposed to resemble ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It is him, when he comes down with damp hair and a major coffee craving, who points out she's treating it as a safe house – she leaves no personal decoration, nothing unique or unusual. It is her who points out that she's never had a house before and she's still getting used to it. The next time he comes to stay he gives her a multi-coloured masterpiece of a quilt made by Laura that she drapes pride of place over the back of her couch. It is the only thing in the room that isn't a shade of white.

Sometimes, Natasha thinks it’s too much. She should have rented an apartment, or moved in with a roommate. That’s when she tells herself that compared to some of the things she's done, living by herself should be a walk in the park; she is nearing eighty years old now anyway, it’s about time she branched out by herself.

 

Despite her mixed feelings about it all, Natasha can't help but admit it is nice to have somewhere to come back to after a busy day/ night at work.

It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and she is finally pulling up into the drive after leaving for SHIELD HQ at half eight the previous morning. She is looking forward to a long nap; Clint is in town after arriving the night before and will be staying in the house before taking off again tomorrow – she expects she will be woken later with a loud bang and a shout that they're going out to a bar and to grab her boots, as he always does when they have a head-wreaking case. All the better to sleep now rather than later.

She mimes fixing her hair and makeup in the rear-view mirror – really, she watches for a tail or anything suspicious – before getting out of the car. The atmosphere feels tense to her, like something is off, not quite right. As she walks to the front door of her house the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and years of experience let her know she is being watched.

Natasha turns, pretending to look in her bag for her keys, and does one last sweep of the road. Everything is normal until she catches it; the briefest flash of a light from a reflection peeking out from the trees in the park.

She jumps, tumbles behind the nearest solid object – a wall to her right – hand on the gun at her waist that she never really stops carrying, even on her down time. She pulls it out and weighs it in her hand, the familiarity of it giving her the courage to poke her head out and judge the distance. The sniper is about fifty feet away.

She calls it in.

“Clint!”

“Natasha?”

“I've got a sniper on me, at the house. Maybe a team as well, I can't see.”

“Shit, are you serious?! Stay put, Nat, wait for backup.”

“Negative, I'm going to take him out.”

“Hey, hang on! Wait a sec–”

She hangs up. Time to go to work. Again.

She manages to creep out of the sniper’s sightline by sneaking into her own back garden and hopping her neighbour’s fence to the road behind it, running out seventy feet before doubling back the last twenty to his position. It’s a small clearing, and when she emerges from the trees, gun trained on the lone figure sitting with his back to her, it’s not a rifle she finds set up but a camera on a tripod.

The photographer nearly wets himself when her sees her, tough and furious behind him so he complies easily enough, moving in fast, jerky movements when he throws her his camera at her request. Instinctively, she knows he isn't a threat – just some desperate schmuck trying to get some good paparazzi shots of the Black Widow to sell to some trashy magazine. That doesn’t stop her deleting all the photos (mostly of her entering and leaving the house). She destroys the camera for good measure, as an example, and lets him run off to spread the word. The Black Widow doesn’t like pictures.

When he gets there, Clint is furious. A private man, the harsh realities of becoming a public figure are still ones he is having trouble adjusting to.

“You get used to it,” Stark claps him on the shoulder later, when they are telling everyone at Stark Tower what happened. “The parties, the chicks, the booze. It’s not so bad.”

Natasha only rolls her eyes at that. “Surely, there's something we can do…”

It’s an issue Stark runs full speed ahead with.

“A union! That’s exactly what we need.”

Before the end of the night, Tony makes his offer. “I'm just saying, you wouldn’t have to worry about neighbours that are trying to kill you if you lived in Stark Tower. Well,” he reconsiders, “Not in the traditional sense.”

“I’d rather stick it out on my own, but thanks,” she declines. She needs her own base to work out of, and the idea of being roommates with a genius insomniac who likes to be loud and doesn’t understand basic concepts like _privacy_ and _personal space_ sounds like a form of torture to her.

“Think about it,” he points at her, “And let me know when you change your mind.”

 

This is her life now. Since she and the rest of her team were dubbed the Heroes of New York – or a Bunch of Freaks, depending on who you talked to – Natasha can't go anywhere public without someone trying to ‘covertly’ take pictures of her. It’s really messed up her career – undercover ops now come with mandatory disguises, which are a pain in the ass and make her tasks a lot harder to accomplish. She was never one for wigs, and roundhouse kicking someone is a lot harder when your fake glasses are falling off your face. She's started to run with extraction teams with Captain America to stop herself from going insane and avoid the fake noses.

Steve is the only one who is enduring a similar situation to her. Stark practically feeds on media attention – or he did; he's probably gathered enough to sustain himself until he's two hundred years old by now – and the rest of the guys have all disappeared: Thor off world, Clint to his farm, and Banner… well, who knows.

But Steve still has to buy groceries, buy clothes, try and get back into the swing of a normal life. They’ve started to hang out a lot. He's a good leader, and a good friend, but he has this perpetual expression on his face that reminds Natasha of a kicked puppy.

So she takes him out shopping, and for coffee. She teaches him how to use a cell phone, explains the acronyms and idioms of the modern world, introduces him to things like dishwashers and microwaves. The rumours circulate, the paparazzi click pictures, the magazines postulate their relationship status, but they ignore them. They view bigger apartments for him in Brooklyn, they go to the gym, they wander around in Central Park and feed the ducks. The day she brings him to the motorcycle dealership is the first day he smiles continuously for longer than an hour.

When Clint comes up to stay for work, the three of them go out for drinks as Steve, Natasha and Clint for a change, rather than Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye. It’s refreshing. Although he's married and therefore the parent of the group, it’s usually Clint who drinks himself under the table. Steve can't get drunk anyway, and Natasha’s own encounter with super-serum means she never really gets more than a little buzzed, so they don’t mind. It does cramp her style a bit when her trashed best friend embarrasses her in front of the person she's decided she wants to go home with, but not enough to sour the deal.

The more they go out, the more she notices Steve’s withdrawal from the opposite sex. She's pretty sure he's not totally gay, but when girls approach him to flirt – and they do, because whole Captain America thing aside, he is a fine male specimen and anyone would have a good time tapping that; even Natasha would be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it – he brushes them off gently. She's thought about asking, or offering to help him out with it, but she hasn’t yet come up with something that doesn’t sound condescending or pitying. So she lets it go, only casually mentions the various girls looking his way, and helps him half-carry a staggering Clint when they leave, all three of them together.

Unlike Steve, who uses his workouts more to deal with his demons than to upkeep the fitness he’ll never lose thanks to the serum, Natasha has to actively train to stay in shape. She gains weight ridiculously easy, but it’s never been a problem before; they never got enough to eat in the Red Room, and old habits hadn’t died while she was striking out on her own. _Hunger is good_ , Madame had always said. _It keeps you alert._

But living in a country that insists on deep frying everything and serving it with extra fat and a pound of sugar on the side is taking its toll. She tries to eat healthily as much as she can, but that often means cooking for herself and she could burn water if she tried. Her irregular – often late – hours and frequent missions mean lunch is regularly a limp, pre-made salad from the cafeteria and dinner is usually take-out from whatever place takes her fancy after staring at all the menus she keeps in a drawer in her desk. She eats with Clint, who objects to her preference of Asian cuisine instead of ‘good, old-fashioned, no fuss pizza’ by eating his slices loudly and obnoxiously, and sometimes Steve, who likes to get everyone to share their food with each other, much to the chagrin of his dinner companions.  

Her dinner dates are also her workout buddies and they meet up most mornings in SHIELD to train. Clint is more into athletics and gymnastics – jumps and kicks and endurance are better tools for a man that fights using dexterity and agility rather than brute strength – whereas Steve likes to lift weights and pound punch bags until they split. Natasha does both, because what is the point of being agile enough to climb up onto a man’s shoulders if she doesn’t have the strength to pull his neck so far around that she snaps his spine?

Clint drinks so much coffee he practically shakes off any unwanted calories, so he usually finishes his workout long before Natasha, and spends the rest of their time in the gym pestering her and distracting her from her reps. She has learned to let him spot her when she lifts weights because it gives him something to do and gives her an excuse to ignore him. He's less likely to poke and prod her when she's lifting a bar with heavy weights on it over her neck. It doesn’t stop him talking, though.

“Coop spies on you when you're training in the barn.” He says one morning, watching Natasha bench press a slightly higher weight than she's used to (she's feeling pumped up today and a little guilty over the previous week’s food choices after taking a couple days off to stay with her best friend and his family before they were called back to work. Laura likes to bake and Natasha doesn’t like to say no to her, and so ends up eating the entire batch of cookies or whatever Laura makes, which causes her to make more and offer them to Natasha… it’s a vicious circle).

Up, down. Breathe in, breathe out. “I know. He's not exactly a master spy yet – not very subtle.”

“He saw you slaughter an innocent scarecrow and wants karate lessons now. Because, and I repeat, ‘Auntie Nat’s so _cool_ ’.”

“Hell yeah, I am,” she grunts, her muscles making their complaints known as she props the bar back on its handles and takes a minute to stretch and crack her wrist.

Clint rolls his eyes. “Thanks to your _coolness_ I currently have an eight-year-old who sets traps around the house and roundhouse kicks me in the face when he doesn’t want to go to bed.”

She does a couple more reps before finding the breath to ask, “How’s his aim?”

“Not bad, actually,” Clint muses. “He almost broke my nose last week.”

She smiles at that. “You must be so proud.”

“You know; I really _am_? Kid’s got spunk.”

“You should show him a couple moves.” She rests the bar back on its handles for good this time and points at her towel beside him, making a grabbing motion with her hand. He picks it up and chucks it so it hits her in the face. She sighs.

“Are you kidding? He's eight! And besides, Laura would fucking kill me.”

The way the colour rises on his neck and his defensive tone tell her all she needs to know. “You’ve already shown him something, haven’t you?”

Clint looks sheepish before he shrugs. “I’ll be damned if my son doesn’t know how to throw a punch.”


	13. WASHINGTON D.C., 2013

“Don’t forget my discount.”

“Sir?”

“I'm an Avenger – surely that entitles me to a discount?”

Natasha sighs. “Clint, stop.” She just wants her goddamn coffee. It’s a Wednesday morning and she's only slept about five hours last night after a twenty-hour workday, and she's about to have to do it all over again today. She is not in the mood for bullshit – but it’s probably her own fault for not insisting Clint stay in the car.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the poor cashier explains, haltingly. “We don’t have a policy…”

“But I'm Hawkeye from the Avengers!” Clint says as if it’s the most amazing thing ever. “And this here’s Black Widow,” he adds as an afterthought, much less enthusiastically and with a jab at her over his shoulder. Her eyes stare daggers into his back.

“Sorry, sir, but the total is still going to be $7.68.”

Clint does a double take. “Holy shit! Eight bucks for two coffees?! Listen, kid, I distinctly remember shooting a fuck-ton of aliens who were going to smash in the windows of this store–”

“The windows got smashed up anyway, man,” the teen says, bored. “I'm sorry, I can't give you money off.”

“I protected this store… sort of. For a little bit. You owe me a discount on my purchase!”

Natasha swears under her breath before elbowing her partner out of the way. “Shut up, Clint. Here,” she places the exact amount in cash on the counter for the cashier to sweep up and add to the till. “The two coffees, please.”

After they collect their drinks they return to the car, Clint complaining the entire time.

“… Don’t have a policy? They don’t need a policy! We’re Avengers and we’re entitled to deductions! What’s the point of even saving the world if the world doesn’t let you have hot beverages at lower prices in return? Punk ass kid.”

Natasha shakes her head. “It was your turn to buy, Barton.”

“Next time, Tasha. When I get my goddamned discount.”

“That’s what you always say,” she sighs, before sipping her source of energy for the next few hours and enjoying the familiar scald of the hot liquid and the bitterness of the coffee beans. She does a lot of sighing when she hangs out with Clint, she's noticed.

“So, how was Manila?” He asks when they're sitting in the car. Natasha’s driving because she likes staying alive and there is no way she is letting Clint drive without at least four cups of coffee in him. As it is he's staring at his cup intently, trying to pinpoint the exact time it will become cool enough for him to drink without burning his tongue. Washington in the morning is gridlocked with traffic but the carpool lane is relatively clear, which is at least one benefit of commuting to work with Clint, even if she has to buy the coffees every time.

Flashes of guns, snapped necks and sore muscles fill her mind but Natasha answers, “Humid. My hair was constantly frizzy. How was Berlin?”

He misses a beat, which tells her all she needs to know. “Meh. Rained a lot,” he says before taking a tentative sip and recoiling, holding his tongue while swearing, “Botherfubber!”

He burns his tongue every single time.

 

They're sparring during their break later when Clint finally comes out with it.

“It was a kill mission. A HYDRA assassin who was getting too big for his boots.”

Natasha’s mind immediately goes to the Soldier before she pointedly directs it towards something else – like how Clint is pushing her into the corner of the mat. She uses his bent knee and his shoulder to vault over his head and land behind him.

“So what happened?” She asks casually, deflecting a half-hearted punch and playfully cuffing him round the head. 

“He took a shot. I had to take him out.”

She relaxes out of her stance, understanding that Clint needs to talk right now rather than fight. With his kids starting to grow up and ask questions, his job description has started to weigh on his mind. He's already begged out of two career days at their school. “It was self-defence, Clint.”

“I know.”

“You can't bring home a stray every time.”

“I know.”

It’s quiet between them for a few minutes while they catch their breath. Clint walks over to their bags against the wall of the training room and rummages through them for water bottles, throwing one to her and emptying the other in what seems like three big gulps.

“Why do you do that? Why do you try and save them?” She has to ask. If it were her mission she would have taken the shot as soon as the target was in her sight-line, but Clint always has to go in and talk. She knows if he didn’t do that, she wouldn’t be here today, but she is one of his very few success stories. Each time his attempts fail, her best friend is left torn up about it and she doesn’t understand why he bothers anymore.

He looks at her for a moment with a hard stare, as if reading her mind, before asking, “What are you really asking me, Tash?”

She looks away, feeling guilty that he can see her true motive under her questions, questions she's been longing to ask for years now. This seems to happen frequently – Clint is one of only two people she's ever met in her life that she has felt she can let her guard down with and show her true self. Strangely enough, sparring on a mat with Clint has become her safe space. As a consequence, it means he knows her almost as well as she knows herself.

This isn't the right time – they're both jet-lagged and sweaty after their session, but it seems like the only time she’ll be brave enough to ask. Today is a bad day, and the guilt is crushing her, squeezing the air from her lungs and stopping her from thinking. She’s exhausted – sleep has eluded her the last few nights, and if she can snatch a few hours she wakes up with a red bracelet around her left wrist from a habit that still haunts her from time to time. “I was out of control. You weren’t the only one with orders to kill me. Anybody who had such a perfect shot would have taken it. So why didn’t you?”

Clint hesitates, thinking before answering, something she appreciates. Whatever about him being an idiot most of the time, when Clint is asked a serious question he doesn’t mince his words. “You looked so… vulnerable. One minute you were powerful, sexy deadliness and I could see why you were a danger… and then you dropped the mask and suddenly there was a very young, very scared woman in front of me. I didn’t think it was fair for that innocence to die, especially at my hand. I only like to shoot the bad guys.”

“Clint, I was a bad guy!”

“But not by choice!” He looks away, frustrated. “I used to steal and cheat and lie, not because I wanted to but because I had no choice – I couldn’t survive without doing it. The look of desperation in your eyes… it was the same as the one looking back at me in the mirror for ten years.

“Fury found me, rehabbed me, and thanks to him now I get to try and wipe out my debts one mission at a time. I wanted the same for you; I guess I just believe in second chances, being the product of one myself.”

“So you thought you could save me, because of some sort of twisted superhero complex?” For some reason, this infuriates her. “I've been playing this game a lot longer than you have, Clint. I've been in this business since before you were born!”

He looks at her with a face full of confusion, opening his mouth to question her but she ploughs through. “Don’t try and tell me you didn’t shoot me for me. It was for purely selfish reasons and you know it.”

“Ok, first of all,” he holds up a finger, “I am capable of being generous from time to time, you know? But you're totally right,” he says in mock seriousness. “The only reason I didn’t kill you was because I was feeling lazy. Hell of a lot of paperwork to fill out after killing someone – forgive me if I wanted to spare myself the pain.”

She rolls her eyes at that – it’s not a real answer and she suspects Clint is starting to get fed up.

“Secondly,” he continues, holding up a second finger to punctuate his statement, “What the fuck are you talking about, Tasha? You're younger than me!”

It was a not so innocent slip of the tongue – she's been meaning to tell him the truth for months now, but kept waiting for the most opportune time. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to have a conversation without plotting her dialogue; but then again, that’s how she was raised. You can take the girl out of Red Room training, but you can't take Red Room training out of the girl.

She trusts Clint inexplicably, she's decided, and she's ready to dive into that box of snakes.

“I wasn’t born in ‘84, Clint.  In fact, I can't remember how I spent most of the eighties, but that’s the perk of working for the KGB!” Her attempt at humour falls flat – Clint is looking at her like she's crazy.

“The fuck, Nat?”

She takes a deep breath – it’s now or never. “I don’t know when I was born. Ivan found me in a burning building in Stalingrad – Volgograd now – during an attack; he brought me into the Red Room. I was one of five to graduate in 1955, after my first mission.”

“So all those older reports of a Black Widow that we dismissed because of the time frame… that was you?”

“Not all of them, obviously, just… most.” Her record was the longest out of the five Black Widows, purely because she had survived the longest. Irina and Sonia died in an explosion in ‘79, kicking off a war and proving that Black Widows should not be made work together, and Katya had disappeared without a trace shortly after. She herself had killed Yelena in 1992 when the woman had come after her for deserting, making sure Natasha knew that their rivalry was still going strong even after forty years – she still had the scars from that particular encounter.

 “Okay…” Clint says as he walks back over to her and pokes her cautiously in the shoulder and ribs. “You're not an alien, are you? Because I don’t think I can take any more aliens. Or gods.”

“No, more like Steve. Serum.”

Clint nods. “You know; this actually explains a lot. Laura has been meaning to ask you what beauty cream you use; and I was starting to feel like a wrinkly old grape next to you.”

“You are a wrinkly old grape; I keep warning you you're going to get skin cancer if you keep letting yourself get sunburned when you're working on the farm.”

Clint waves her off like he's batting a fly, grinning. Natasha is afraid he doesn’t understand what she just told him – it changes everything. It means her rap sheet is even longer than he thought; her ledger is ten times as wet and heavy with blood. She wasn’t what he thought she was, when he saved her all those years ago in Rio. She was, is, much, much worse. The fact that he is still in the same room with her is ridiculous – in her opinion, he should be calling in backup to take her out.

“Clint…” She starts, nervous to go on, but prepared for the misguided yet inevitable feeling of betrayal when he calls the teams in. As he should. It’s time she paid for her actions.

Again, he reads her like a book. “Natasha, I'm not going to turn you in. This doesn’t change anything! So you're older than me – it just means I owe you a lot more birthday bashes then I thought.”

“Then I’ll call Fury myself!” She knows Nick has suspected she is older than she claims since their first meeting, and whatever their relationship now – they don’t trust each other completely but there's more than just respect between them – faced with proof he would have to order for her to be locked up. She turns to go for her cell phone in her bag but he catches her arm and twists her back to face him. His hand is callused and rough on her skin, and he squeezes her so tightly it’s almost painful, but the pain grounds her.

“Now who's acting like an idiot?” He says, hotly. “I get it, Nat, you feel guilty for what you did. But you were young, brain-washed, and you didn’t know anything different. You have to stop thinking that you deserve a death sentence. Look at all the good you’ve done!” He shakes her a little, and Natasha is a little shocked at how passionately he's speaking. “You’ve stopped wars, saved shit tons of innocent lives, saved me half a hundred times and we’ve even _saved the world_.

“I meant what I said. I didn’t kill you because you didn’t deserve to die. And before you say it,” he lets go of her and holds up a hand, effectively silencing her protests, “Everyone deserves to be saved, even if it’s from themselves. Just because you come from a bad place, doesn’t mean you're a bad person. Just because you did bad things, doesn’t mean that’s all you’ll ever do.”

Once again, her best friend has displayed faith and trust in her that is unwarranted, and a few years ago would have sent her running for the hills.

They gaze at each other for a minute, Natasha unsure, Clint resolute, before he burps loudly. “Shit, I feel like Yoda or something after that. Patience you must have, my young padawan!” He does a terrible impression of the Jedi master that always brings a smile to her face before punching her arm her affectionately. “Are we done with this therapy session now? Or do I have to get some chocolate ice-cream and drag you down to the shooting range?”


	14. WASHINGTON D.C., 2014

SHIELD has fallen. The ‘Death of Nick Fury’ has left her in a bit of a complicated situation. He's still head of SHIELD, but no one knows it. Instead, Natasha works as his proxy, foiling terrorist plots and tracking HYDRA movements while he plays dead off somewhere in Europe doing God knows what. She has to pretend she's got all the cards when in fact she's being dangled on a string and it makes her cranky. It doesn’t help that many of the agents she called her colleagues may have been HYDRA the whole time, and the fact that many of the morally repugnant missions she carried out over the years for ‘the greater good’ may have been for the opposite.

Encrypted emails arrive in her inbox from time to time; assignments from Fury that only he trusts her to carry out. On this occasion, details of a Mexican weapons producer with possible HYDRA ties are attached to an email with the single verse, ‘Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and their doom comes swiftly – Deuteronomy 32:35’. She can read the objective loud and clear.

It quickly becomes obvious that this is a deep cover op. There are several inaccuracies in the company’s report, inaccuracies that Natasha suspects Fury knew she’d spot and investigate. Evidence of the company having HYDRA connections is circumstantial at best; she's going to have to go undercover – a task infinitely more difficult since her face was plastered all over world newspapers after the Battle of New York and the Congressional hearings. She's going to need a team.

Clint is easy. Like her, he's not too happy he may have been helping HYDRA all these years instead of destroying them, and once she explains the situation and her plan he refuses to let her go without him. Even Laura agrees with him, when Natasha calls her to complain. Despite her better judgement and the prospect of future headaches caused by him, Natasha is glad to have him at her back again. Since his retirement, missions haven't had the appeal they once did (not that she would ever tell him that).

A lack of better options has her recruiting Steve and Sam. They work well together, and she's sure Sam would appreciate a holiday in Mexico, even if it isn't really a holiday.

The night before they leave, Natasha brings Clint with her to talk them into it – the ambush tactic may be a little childish but she's playing things close to her chest and the less people in the know about this mission at any one time, the better.

 “Tash, some things are better left to the imagination, and a man’s bachelor pad is one of them. What if he has company?” Clint worries once they reach the apartment door.

“Oh, come on… this is Steve Rogers we’re talking about!” She dispels his last argument with a laugh as she fiddles with the lock. “And since when did you care about breaking in to people’s homes?”

“I don’t, I just want the moral high ground so when Cap gets mad I won’t get blamed.”

“You really would throw me to the wolves like that?”

“It’s more like I'm throwing the wolves to you…”

The lock clicks and she eases the handle down, peeking inside into the pitch blackness and turning to Clint before she opens the door.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” She grins wickedly, exposing her white, pearly teeth like fangs and he imperceptibly shudders.

“It’s what we’ll find in it that worries me, Romanoff,” he replies.

She makes it eight steps into the apartment before she has to duck and dodge a punch from the super soldier. He's deadly even when rumpled and glassy-eyed from sleep, but it takes him a few seconds to recognise that she's not a threat to him (well, not this time).

“Romanoff,” he sighs, moving his hands to his hips instead of trying to violently introduce them to her face. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She pouts. “Can't a girl pay her friend a surprise visit?”

“She can, it’s the breaking in to said friend’s flat in the early hours of the morning that throws me off a little.”

“What can I say, I'm unconventional,” she smiles indulgently. “Some people would find that attractive.”

“Are you trying to attract me?” His eyebrow raises.

“You tell me.” She takes a step forward. “It is the perfect time of night for a booty call. Is it working?”

“I’m right here, and uncomfortable!” Clint calls from the doorway, muttering something about flirting and his delicate constitution. She’s not flirting, not with intention anyway – this is how they interact. Natasha likes to bait Cap, to try to coax him out of his stern leader role, whether for his own good or her personal pride, she's not sure. But she gets a kick out of him matching her taunts tit for tat. It’s also nice to toy with a man as good-looking as Steve is without any false pretences – she gets to keep her skills sharp, there's no expectation and she’d be lying if she didn’t enjoy it.

“Come inside then, and stop being such a shit,” she says, not taking her eyes off Steve while he sizes her up.

She knows she passes his test when his frame relaxes and he breaks eye contact with her. A hand comes up to rub on his neck and Natasha graciously appreciates the view of his abs in the light from the doorway. It might be a little tactless to openly admire a man’s muscles but it’s not her fault she has a respect for art, being brought up a dancer… _No, that’s wrong_.

The moment’s over and it takes Natasha a second to realise she's frowning at a patch of carpet. Steve has migrated to the kitchen and Clint is feeling out the walls for a light switch. She hears the switch on the coffee machine before the room is illuminated and all three of them recoil and squint in the now brightly lit apartment.

“Alright, Nat,” Steve says once his eyes have adjusted. “What is so important it can't wait ‘til morning?”

She tries to be tactful about it. “There's a situation that Director Fury would like to draw your attention to.”

“How long more will I have to play Fury’s lapdog? I'm looking for Bucky.”

“At least you're not rolling over doing tricks, man.”

They both ignore Clint and she rolls her eyes at Steve. “Stop being so dramatic. This is your job; in case you’d forgotten, you're a STRIKE Team Leader. But since SHIELD isn't technically a thing anymore, how about a little off-the-books mission? You can bring Sam… and we both know he’ll want to come and do something useful, instead of chasing cold leads all the time.”

She knows that deep down, Steve must realise that the Winter Soldier will not surface again until he's good and ready. This quest he's roped Sam into isn't healthy for anyone, but she suspects Steve is focusing a little too much on the man that was his best friend rather than the man he stood opposite a few months ago. For her part, she hasn’t let herself think about it or the shock of seeing him again for the first time in years on that overpass. And he shot her! Again! The bastard would live to regret it.

“Besides, I need you. I’ll be undercover. Clint will run point but he needs to lie low. Officially, he's not allowed enter the city,” she continues.

Clint confirms this. “That’s one thing you’ve gotta give cartels – management might change regularly, but it doesn’t stop them holding grudges or bounties on your head.”

Steve sighs but she knows she's got him. “Where are we going?”

“That’s the best part. Tijuana.”

“No, the best part of this is there's no debrief; open ended vacation, baby! Being sort of unemployed has its bonuses.” Clint chimes in. “Are you in or are you in, Rogers?”

Steve reaches into a cupboard behind him to grab three mugs and place them on the counter: a black one, one with a cereal brand on it, and a gag mug she bought him for Christmas the year before – the most garishly patriotic one she could find at the time, with a bald eagle shouting ‘freedom!’ on a backdrop of the American flag. She claims the black mug.

“HYDRA are smuggling weapons into the US,” she leans over the counter and closer to Steve while allowing him to fill her mug with unnecessarily thick coffee (a war habit he has yet to shake). “Weapons they are using to kill innocent people. Someone needs to stop them, and I'm asking you to help me do it.”

Steve lets out a pained sigh, that tortured frown in permanent place on his face.

“I'm sure Barnes will still be missing by the time we get back,” she wheedles.

“Fine. I’ll do it, Natasha.”

That’s one item checked off her shopping list. She smiles widely and takes a sip from her mug, careful to swallow it before she can taste it; Clint, less experienced with Barista Steve, does the same and gags. He drinks so much coffee that he treats anything sub-par as a personal betrayal.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea, though?”

That makes her frown. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Steve makes a face. “I mean, you're kind of all over the internet right now.”

“It’ll be fine,” she breezes, but she's a bit rankled that Steve is questioning her capability. It’s something that’s rarely happened in her life and she's never been good at handling it. She has a compulsive need to prove herself.

“If Clint is a target why is he still coming?” Steve questions her again, and Natasha can't help but feel he's nitpicking her mission.

“Because he's experienced at running infils, he has a higher clearance level than you which makes him qualified to run this mission and he's the only one I trust to have my back.”

“You don’t think I can save you?”

Natasha doesn’t even have to think. “No, I don’t. And I don’t trust you to know when I shouldn’t be saved either, or when I can save myself,” she snaps before resuming her business-like tone. “Meet us on the corner of H street and 21st in four hours.”

With that, she drains the last of the coffee – now she knows what tar tastes like – and turns on her heel, motioning to Clint that it’s time to leave.

Clint presses back his full cup right into Steve’s hand. “You ever think of getting a cleaning lady or something? Your place is a mess.”

“Sorry, I would have tidied up but I wasn’t expecting guests at three o’clock in the morning!”

“I always pegged you for a neat freak, Rogers, but this… makes you seem like a real human being.”

“As opposed to a fake one,” Steve comments drily.

“You know what I mean,” Clint waves nonchalantly. “TTYL.”

 

She drives to Sam’s house. She can feel Clint’s eyes on her in the car but she ignores him – she knows he picked up on her irritation with Steve, and she hates the angry monster she turns into when anyone starts questioning how she does her job. It’s one of the downsides of working with members of a team that come from different backgrounds. She and Clint are assassins and spies – they work in bloody deeds and dark shadows; Steve is a honourable soldier and a good man to the bone, and Natasha doesn’t know how incorporate elements of something so foreign to her in her mission plans.

Clint doesn’t question, just follows, when she pulls up in a side alley and vaults over the adjacent wall, the same one she struggled over only a couple months ago after nearly being blown up. She raps on the glass door and waits a moment for Sam to come and open it.

“You know I have a front door, right?” He says, in lieu of a greeting.

She just smiles indulgently. “You going to let us in or what?”

He steps aside graciously, allowing Natasha and Clint to step on through into the kitchen, where despite the early hour, he had clearly been having breakfast.

“Sam,” she greets him with the detached warmth she's perfected over the years. Friendly but not affectionate, cheerful but not delighted. He makes a face at her.

“Is that how you say hi to all your friends? Bring it in,” he says and when she's trapped in his embrace, continues, “Aw yeah, that’s better. Mmhmm.”

It’s a testament to how much she likes Sam that she doesn’t snap his ribs.

Once he's let her go she introduces him to Clint, who gets a kick out of meeting another bird-themed Avenger. The mission pitch isn't met with as much enthusiasm as she hoped for, however, as Sam remains contemplative after she finishes talking. 

“If you're worried about a salary, don’t. You will receive financial compensation.” She drops the briefing packet on the table and Sam whistles when he sees the sum.

“All this for a couple of weeks with some good friends in Mexico?”

“We’re investigating ill- _eagle_ activity.”

Clint groans while Sam laughs. “Is that how it’s gonna be?”

She smiles, proud of her pun. “Only if you decide to come.”

“What did Steve say? You know we’re in the middle of a Where’s Wally situation right now–”

“Steve’s coming.”

“Oh,” Sam looks surprised. “Alright then. I'm in.”

“Just like that?” Clint asks, taken aback by the other man’s abrupt change of heart.

“Just like that,” he confirms. “When are we going?”

Natasha had expected this would be the outcome, and isn't fazed at Sam’s sudden decision. “Now. Go pack a bag – we’re picking Steve on the way to the airport.”

Sam makes a face, but does as she says. She waits ten minutes before she follows him into his bedroom, to watch him rummage around his closet for his flip flops and swimming shorts. There's an old rubix cube on his dresser; she picks it up and fiddles with it, wondering how people can get enjoyment out of turning squares back and forward.

“Steve is Captain America – why does he have a lower clearance level than you?” Sam asks her out of the blue as he grabs a separate bag for his Falcon gear. His clothes bag is an old, brown leather thing but this is more like a briefcase than anything and airport security is definitely going to be fun. She looks at him and he shrugs, but she would bet ten bucks that he's been dying for the answer to this question for a while.

“Steve believes everything is either good or bad; black or white. I know that the world is more shades of grey than anything else.” Fury always appreciated her pragmaticism.

Sam nods, then says, “How many shades, would you say? Would you say, maybe, fifty shades?” He adds a wink as he zips up the bag.

She raises her eyebrows, and sets the toy back on his dresser, solved. “If you're comparing the world to Fifty Shades of Grey, do I want to know what kind of sex you're having?”

“The respectful and consensual kind.”

“Right answer.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She's always appreciated Sam’s awareness of how easily she could beat him in a fight.

 

They’ve been in Tijuana for a month; Natasha’s worked undercover for three weeks when she realises the organisation isn't just smuggling HYDRA weapons. It’s a HYDRA base, and she's right in the lion’s den.

It takes her a split second to decide the mission timeline has to be sped up – there's an increasing risk everyday she's here that HYDRA will realise that the pretty redhead technician they just hired is actually an assassin with her life poured out into the internet and she doesn’t want to take the chance of spooking any of them.

She calls it in to Clint, who's running point at a hotel across the city, wearing lots of Hawaiian shirts and wide brimmed hats as he lives by the pool; ignores his message instructing her to wait for backup, and goes to work.

She emerges from the building just as her team pull up outside. It’s a facility of less than fifty people, and it was lunchtime when a secretary found her at the computer, accessing the mainframe to download all their data.

The whole massacre aspect of the mission brings back bad memories. She hasn’t had to do something so bloody for a while – in her mind she scolds herself for becoming soft, but a small part of her is comforted by the ill feeling in her stomach.

She wears the yellow and purple flowers that have bloomed across her skin with pride, but it doesn’t stop him from losing his shit.

“Jesus, Nat! You couldn’t wait half an hour?!” Clint jumps out of the car, slamming the door shut behind him as he strides up to her and grabs her to inspect the rapidly growing bloody bump on her forehead. Cap and Sam follow behind him but keep their distance – neither of them are too happy either; Cap looks downright livid.

“It’s fine, it’s done,” she says nonchalantly, submitting to her best friend’s examination, letting him rotate her head back and forth and check for signs of concussion.

“Oh, it is most certainly _not fine_!” he exclaims, and Natasha can see it in his eyes – he's going to tell Laura. She's in trouble. She may have survived this fight, but Laura will probably put her in the ground with the telling off she's going to get.

Clint lets her go, satisfying his concern and deeming her to not have any serious injuries, before walking a little distance away to call it in. She smiles sheepishly at Cap and Sam.

“Did you have to kill everyone, Romanoff?” Captain America asks her, icily.

She sighs. Steve’s morality can be such a pain in the ass – he was like this on the Lumerian Star, and now, again, emerges his _holier than thou_ attitude. They're friends, but sometimes they're so different it’s jarring. “Cap, all of the workers here were threats. They don’t have to be HYDRA; they just have to talk.” She explains.

“Oh, and I guess the canteen lady and the front desk receptionist knew all the top-secret information.” He storms off further into the facility, looking for survivors no doubt. He won’t find any, she knows. It’s always the seemingly non-essential personnel that know the most about their employers rather than the actual workers – a twist on the ‘little pitchers have big ears’ theory. Information from overheard conversations and stolen glances at reports can be more dangerous than bullets.

“Hey, I get it,” Sam says, quietly approaching her from behind to stand at her shoulder, mistaking her silence for hurt. “Shades of grey, right?”

She nods, recalling their old conversation. “All fifty of them. Drink?”

“Drink!” Clint calls from behind her, in confirmation. She needs some alcohol in her after this.

“Do you think the ladies will think less of me if I order one of those pink cocktails with an umbrella in it? I don’t know why but I've always wanted to try one of them.” Sam asks as they get into the car to wait for Steve.

“I have a favourite cocktail,” Clint supplies unhelpfully. “It’s tequila, mixed with a different brand of tequila and slice of lime.”

“Otherwise known as a tequila shot,” she deadpans. “Where’s the bar?”

SHIELD might be over, but Natasha will be okay. She's got friends, she's got her skills. She's adaptable. She’ll survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end!   
> Thanks for reading :)

**Author's Note:**

> All Russian in this chapter was written using Google Translate. Hopefully it isn't too inaccurate.


End file.
